A Common Cause
by moonswirl
Summary: Gleekathon, days 1686-1721: As things are continuing to move forward at McKinley, three years onward, Kurt can finally tell Blaine how he and Doctor went after those who wreaked havoc at Isher Academy. - DW/Glee crossover #9
1. An Old Story

_Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, etc through 80th cycle. Now cycle 81!_

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**"A Common Cause"  
Doctor Who/Glee crossover #9  
From DW: 10th Doctor, (Donna)  
From Glee: Kurt**

**1. An Old Story**

_San Francisco, California – in the year 2015_

There were some things Kurt had never found to be compatible to his patience, but then it wasn't all the time, and he could be made to wait, either because he really wanted to, or because there was some necessity to it. Waiting to tell Blaine about his adventure with the Doctor had been of necessity, although with time there had been some wanting, too; seeing the look on his face now definitely made it worth it.

"Why didn't you tell me before?" Blaine first asked.

"I couldn't," Kurt pointed out. "If I did, then you would never have asked him, and he never would have done it," he explained simply, and Blaine sat back, knowing there was no working around that.

"But when…"

"Do you remember a little while before graduation and all that, I disappeared for like a day?" Kurt recalled, and he could see the memory work its way to the surface.

"So when I told you about how I'd found out he existed…"

"I'd already met him," Kurt confirmed. Blaine chuckled, amazed. "I hated not being able to tell you."

"Did you?" Blaine asked, and after a moment, Kurt gave a slight shrug.

"For the most part," he admitted. "Pretending like I knew nothing could be fun, too. I did always wonder when it would happen, that you met him and asked him to come for me. If you just disappeared out of nowhere, or took too long to get back from somewhere…"

"Like now?" Blained guessed.

"Like now," Kurt confirmed. "So that's over now."

"So what happened?"

"Well…" Kurt sighed. "I found out why Donna didn't remember me, when I saw her again, you know?" Blaine nodded. "All that time I thought maybe I hadn't made as big an impression on her as she did on me," he went on, then shook his head. "That wasn't it at all, or… maybe it was, but there's no way to know. The Doctor explained it to me, I guess it had just happened, not long before he came to me. I think it might have been why he did come in the first place."

Kurt told him, what he knew at least. It had been impossible to know how much the Doctor had and hadn't told, whether he'd changed anything, to protect her memory, her as he remembered her at least, or to protect him, from the harshness of it all. He hadn't prodded too far, sensing the alien man was telling him anything at all, for no other reason than maybe he owed him some amount of truth. The Doctor told him how Donna Noble had somehow been imbued with the Time Lord's mind, how she had helped to save them all because of this, but that in the end it had been too much for her brain, her human brain, to handle, and it would have killed her if he hadn't taken it away. The price had been her memories, of everything they had ever done together. Donna no longer knew she had ever met the man, or gone to any of the places they'd gone, done the things they'd done… including a visit to a Gap store in Lima, Ohio, where she'd seen the Warblers of Dalton Academy and spoken to a boy named Kurt Hummel and given him advice he'd taken to heart.

"She doesn't remember any of it?" Blaine was taken aback. He'd only left her less than an hour ago, and now he was finding out that, wherever she was, Donna had already forgotten it, in her own actual time.

"She can't," Kurt confirmed. "The Doctor said that if she remembered, it could kill her."

"Doesn't seem fair, does it?" Blaine processed what Kurt had known for three years already. He remembered most of all the short talk they'd had, sitting outside, while the Doctor had been off to find the instrument, before he'd followed them to the TARDIS. That was the first time he'd really gotten to know the woman Kurt had told him about, those times he'd met her, and he could see why, in those two short encounters, she had endeared herself to him and made the impression she had.

"The Doctor said he came for me because he thought he had some unfinished business with her, and with us. He didn't know about all that business at McKinley three years ago yet… But he thought we should take care of this thing, me and him, to honor her," Kurt smiled, and it did ease some of Blaine's sadness at finding out what had happened to her.

"Then you did find them, the ones who used the kids from Isher Academy?"

"Well, I didn't find them, the Doctor did, but… yeah, we went after them. Probably wasn't too hard to look, once you knew what you had to search for. They hadn't done what they'd planned to do, but as far as they were concerned they'd gotten away with it, so what was to stop them from trying their luck somewhere else?"

Blaine felt a chill at the thought of it. He'd told Kurt about what had happened, including how he had been entranced the same way the children had, how he'd almost hurt people, but he doubted Kurt could really understand, what it had been like, what it had felt like, and what it meant to him that the people responsible had never been punished and might get the opportunity to do it again somewhere else, with more people, more innocents. If they were willing to use those kids, then what weren't they willing to do?

"What happened?" he asked, dread settling into him at the thought of finding out.

"Well, I was at school one day, and then he just… showed up," Kurt shook his head, recalling. "I was at my locker, and he came. He looked the same as when I saw him at the Gap that time, but there was something different… Sad, but determined. He said he needed my help."

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	2. Welcoming Committee

**"A Common Cause"**

**2. Welcoming Committee**

_April 2012 – Lima, Ohio_

Once again she was finding herself at the mercy of cryptic time and place coordinates to figure out what her next step may be. She had come to this one at least with one bit of further instructions: _Hide._

Gemma hadn't been entirely sure as to what this would end up referring to until she heard the familiar thrumming of the TARDIS. If she was being told to hide from the TARDIS, then she had a fairly good idea why that was, so she scrambled and did as told, ducking behind a large tree.

Very carefully, she had gotten a look around the tree to see what was happening, or rather who would step out of the ship.

Kurt still had the same clothes on that he'd been wearing the last time she'd seen him, the day before, at McKinley, before his Glee Club director had stood witness – partly – to his disappearance. He was looking around for a moment, and she knew exactly what that moment was like, the first time finding yourself back in your own time and place, after having been whisked away somewhere completely different by the Time Lord.

The boy turned back, for what she guessed were his goodbyes to the Doctor, and moments later, as he stepped away, the police box was disappearing again. Kurt stood to watch this happen, and when it was completely gone, he still remained stuck to the ground for a few moments more before turning and walking on his way. As he did, Gemma knew she could finally step forward and reveal her presence, in more ways than one.

"Hello, Kurt," she smiled. He blinked, not entirely detached from whatever had happened just now, and being entirely baffled to find himself in front of his substitute teacher, especially considering certain other things, which they would get to in moments.

"Miss… I… uh…" he stammered. He didn't know whether he should say anything or not. _Allow me…_

"It's alright, take it easy," she counseled. "I know it can be a bit awkward, your first time back."

"Back…" he repeated slowly, still negotiating his words and his path. "Back from where?" he finally decided. She sighed.

"Well, let's see, I haven't actually gone yet," she pointed to herself. "But judging by the look on your face right now," her fingers swivelled to point at him now, "I'm going to take a guess and say you saw me out there, wherever it is the Doctor took you… on the TARDIS… Please stop me if I'm getting warm."

"That really was you," his eyes were fixed and wide.

"Will be me, yes," Gemma nodded. "The tenses thing, we'll get the hang of it," she promised.

"Who are you?" he asked, getting more of a grip on things now. He looked like he was debating whether or not to run.

"A friend, and I think you know that. Tell you what, to prove it, whenever I do go and end up seeing you, I will tell you, I'll say," and Kurt said it with her, "Hello, friend." She smiled. "Yes, like that. And if you need yet more convincing, sometime in the coming week, you will be brought into a bit of a secret."

"I will?" Kurt blinked.

"It's becoming a bit less of that, these days, with how many people are finding out, but so far they're only people who were supposed to find out in the first place, so we can call that a success, right?"

"What kind of people?" he asked.

"The kind you trust, implicitly," she told him. "I swear," she went on, and it seemed thankfully that he did trust her. "There is one thing though, and it might be the most important one."

"What's that?" Kurt looked nervous again.

"You can't tell anyone."

"I don't understand."

"It's simple enough. Everything I just told you, everything that just happened to you, meeting the Doctor, doing whatever you two did out there, you can't tell anyone about it."

"Why not?" he became annoyed there.

"Beats me," she reached in her pocket and pulled out an envelope. "But I got this, from the Doctor…" she showed the card inside, and he read it aloud.

"Don't let the other ones find out about Kurt, it's a surprise." He looked back at her. "Seriously?"

"Hey, I don't make the rules, I just follow them… a lot," she put card and envelope back in her pocket.

"I still don't know who you are," he told her.

"Right, well maybe it's better I don't tell you, or they might know that I told you."

"Or they might lie or catch me out and I won't know, and if you're going to make me lie, you at least owe me that much, don't you?"

"Wow, okay, that's…" she smirked. "Fine then," she held out her hand, and after a moment he shook it. "Gemma Lucas, future companion to the Doctor," she introduced herself.

"Future as in you're from the future?" Somehow it had started to amuse her to see people react to this.

"And you're from the past, look, we're learning," she teased, but then looked him straight on. "I wouldn't ask too many questions if I were you."

"What, like I'll ask for lottery numbers or something?"

"Or something," she nodded.

"Fine, I won't ask," he agreed.

"Thank you, now about your cover story."

"Cover story?" he frowned.

"Yes, because there will be some people curious as to why you disappeared from school yesterday."

"Yesterday?"

"It's Saturday now," she revealed, and his whole face looked like it was swearing. "Easy, easy, you've got time."

"Easy for you to say," he blinked, and she tried and failed not to laugh.

"Look, I'll help you, really, with school, with your dad…"

"You know about my dad?"

"Part of the job," she nodded. He was getting frazzled again. "You hungry? Let me get you something to eat and we can talk, alright?"

"Sure, yeah, okay," they walked off together.

"Right, now one more thing."

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	3. A Box in the Hall

**"A Common Cause"**

**3. A Box in the Hall**

_April 2012 – Lima, Ohio – Friday_

It had so far been one of those days where he wasn't necessarily bummed out but he wasn't jumping with joy either. He was just… present. As he stood at his locker, seeking out which of his books he'd stuck one small note in, it would have taken something monumental to grab his attention.

A familiar but unexpected faces would do the trick.

He'd been exasperated, and he'd stretched his neck, and that was when he'd caught a glimpse of him. He'd done a proper double take, because as much as he remembered exactly how he knew the man, he didn't think it possible that he would suddenly be in his school, staring right back at Kurt in such a way that made it entirely clear he was looking for him. When the man had been sighted, he'd motioned for Kurt to join him, and in a move that should have been classified as the very beginning of a horror movie, Kurt had hurried away to meet him. He couldn't help himself. His encounter with the man, but particularly with the woman who'd been with him the last time, Donna, had been something of a nagging mystery for him. He had a strong belief that he let the man go this time, he would never know the answer.

"I know you," Kurt stated firmly as he walked into the classroom where the man was standing. Then he stopped.

There was another door at the other end of the classroom, leading into one of the back halls, and as it stood open, Kurt could see through it a tall wooden box. It was blue, and there was something mesmerizing about it that Kurt couldn't explain… but he was drawn to it.

"What's going on?" he turned back to the man. He was smiling, but it didn't reach his eyes, which would have been troubling if Kurt didn't get the feeling like it was sadness down to his soul. "I have seen you before, haven't I? I'm not making it up?"

"You're not," the man assured him. "We never actually properly meet, did we?" he held out his hand, and though he was now debating whether he should be standing here after all, Kurt shook it.

"Kurt Hummel," he stated.

"Hello, Kurt Hummel, I'm the Doctor."

"The D…" he started to repeat, but then the man had moved to the blue box, and before Kurt could ask him what he was doing, he'd opened the door. Kurt forgot how to speak. What he saw didn't seem possible. Outside the hall where the box sat, there was nothing, only the school grounds, grass, trees… This couldn't be a prank, but maybe it was an illusion?

The man had walked into the box. He'd walked in, and he'd kept walking, and how could a box so small make for so much walking? When he came and stood in front of the door, he decided maybe he'd fallen and hit his head, because he looked inside and it looked very real… an entire room, bigger than the classroom he'd been standing in, and it was inside a box he could touch both sides of if he reached out his arms. Because there really didn't seem like anything else to do in response to something like that, he took a tentative step forward, into the box and its large room. It was real, and his knees buckled.

"I'm sure you have a lot of questions," the Doctor told him. Kurt stepped back out, shaking his head. It couldn't be real, no… but he'd stepped inside, so how could it not? He turned back, and the man had followed him again.

"I don't understand…"

"She spoke highly of you, you know?" the Doctor chose to ignore this, and Kurt found himself drawn to do the same.

"She…" He knew who had to mean, but he had to be sure.

"Only spoke to you for a minute or so, didn't she? Donna, she did," he nodded. There it was again, the sadness, Kurt thought.

"Where is she?" he asked, casually looking to the box with its open doors.

"She's…" the Doctor searched for words. "Gone home," was all he could say.

"Right," Kurt said, though he still had this feeling like he was missing something big.

"Kurt, I need your help."

"My help? With what?"

"Unfinished business," the Doctor looked back at him.

"I don't even know you," Kurt frowned.

"Might have been we'd never have met, you and I, but as it turns out maybe we were always headed to this. Look, I made a promise to someone. I can't tell you what promise, or to who I made it…"

"And that's supposed to make me want to go with you?"

"Perhaps not," the Doctor admitted. "But it's a start. I can see it right there," he pointed to Kurt's face. "You're starting to wonder." Kurt tried to look down, but it felt strange to do it, so he made himself keep looking at the man.

"Tell me what happened with Donna," he said. The Doctor's eyes ticked to the side. "Because I keep getting this feeling like it's important. Did you two have a fight?"

"I couldn't even begin to explain it to you," the Doctor briefly paced.

"Why not?" Kurt asked.

"Because you're still under the assumption that I'm a human being and that this story is so simple as a person no longer being in another person's life, and then how am I supposed to make you understand?"

"I'm sorry, you lost me after… what do you mean I'm assuming you're human? Are you saying you're…" He looked back to the box, the infinitely impossible box, before turning back to the Doctor. "I think… maybe you should start from the beginning."

The Doctor walked back into the box. There was just one tiny part of Kurt that said he should run, but that was common sense, which apparently had gone right out the window about a minute or two ago. So Kurt once again stepped through the wooden blue door.

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	4. The Gap Man's Ship

**"A Common Cause"**

**4. The Gap Man's Ship**

_Inside the TARDIS_

"Shut the door, please?" the Doctor asked Kurt as he walked in again.

"Why?" Kurt asked, cautious.

"You'll see. If what I've told you already isn't proof enough, then I know just the thing."

When Kurt had finally done as told, the Doctor had pulled a lever, and with a mighty tremor that nearly sent them both off their feet, they were in motion.

"What are you doing?" Kurt asked, slightly alarmed, as he grasped on to the nearest rail he could get a hold of. The Doctor said nothing; he didn't have to. Only a few seconds went by before it all stopped.

"Go on, have a look," he nodded to the doors.

He didn't know what he'd expected to find out there except exactly what had been there when he'd stepped in, but when he opened the doors to the strange box, they were not in school anymore.

"This is my house," he blinked, taking a step out into the dining room. This might have been an illusion, but it wasn't; he was sure, this was real. "So, if you're not human, then you're… an alien," he tipped his head, and the Doctor nodded.

"By your perspective, I'd say, yes."

"You're not from Mars or anything, are you?"

"No, not from Mars," he promised, a memory in mind.

"Then that's… that's your ship?" Kurt asked, walking back through the doors, advancing to the controls for the first time, looking up at the high ceiling, all of it… He'd come very close to commenting on how real it looked, but then it was real, so it was only normal, wasn't it?

"It's called the TARDIS," the Doctor informed him.

"What happened to Donna?" Kurt asked, and his tone made it clear he wanted the full story this time. "I saw her once, after that time. She didn't recognize me at all."

"Because she can't," the Doctor stated; he didn't want to have to talk about it. "She lost her memories, that is… I had to take them away. Something happened, there was no other way. She has no recollection of anything we did together, and that includes meeting you. She can't remember, we can't make her."

Whether he could or would say anything further, it wouldn't be now. Still, Kurt's need to know had been satisfied… maybe too much. It hit him hard to find out all of this, but he remembered that time he'd seen her again and he knew this was absolutely the truth. She hadn't remembered him. She wouldn't even have remembered being at the Gap store. Now that they'd gotten this far, he was able to ask another question, and he had a feeling this time the Doctor would have no problem about explaining.

"Why am I here? You said you needed my help."

"Indeed I do," the Doctor moved back out of the ship and went to sit on the Hummels' couch. Kurt followed him, sitting across from him. "The thing is, there will come a day when I meet your friend, the boy you were with, when you saw me last." Kurt blinked.

"Blaine? You met Blaine?"

"I did do, yes," the Doctor confirmed, working not to reveal how he knew they would one day marry. "Or, I should say _I_ met him, he _will_ meet me, someday. At this time he hasn't met me yet."

"Future Blaine," Kurt tried to picture it and he smiled.

"Yes, him. I met him, and it so happened that we had to take him with us, Donna and I. We went to a planet called Mesiary. There was a music academy there. There were these people, we never did find out where they'd come from or who they were. They set out to use some of the pupils of the Isher Academy, told them they'd been accepted into an elite program. What they were really doing was training them, making them learn to use a new instrument that wasn't an instrument at all, it was only made to match the settings on a weapon. They were entranced, sent out to kill for practice."

"That's terrible," Kurt blurted out.

"And only got worse," the Doctor nodded. "There were twenty of them, but they only needed three. First they cut the number by half, had a concert, to test their skills. Those ten who didn't pass were killed right then and there, after the concert. The others were brought elsewhere, made to fight, until only three were left. We managed to stop whatever they were planning to do, to send the children home, those three who'd lived," he bowed his head; even now, he still felt that guilt in him. "But those who created all this, they got away. I never got to stop them from striking again, and that's why I need your help."

"I… I'm… honored?" he wasn't sure what else to say. "But why me?"

"For Blaine, for Donna," the Doctor told him.

"Okay, but we'll need to find them first, right? That could take a while…" Kurt pointed out, finding that going along with it was much easier. In the span of however long they'd been talking, he'd known that he trusted the man… and he did want to help.

"Oh, I already did that, before I came to look for you," the Doctor revealed.

"Just like that?" Kurt was stunned.

"No, of course not, it took months," the Doctor sat back.

"Months?"

"Close enough to, yeah. It was only going to be a matter of time before they showed their hand, once they found something worth going after again. So what do you say?" he tipped his head toward the ship.

"But… I have school, and Glee Club, and my dad, and… Blaine…"

"I did mention, time travel, yeah?" the Doctor stood. "I'll have you back before they even know you're gone," he promised.

Travelling in time, in space, with an alien and his ship… Saving people… It did sound better than gym class… "Alright then," he stood to face the alien man. "I want to go."

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	5. Little White Lies

**"A Common Cause"**

**5. Little White Lies**

_April 2012 – Lima, Ohio – Monday_

Kurt didn't know how it had happened, but suddenly his school didn't feel the same. That wasn't completely true of course, he did know what had changed between this Monday morning and the last time he'd been here, on Friday afternoon. He'd met the Doctor, or met him a second time actually, only this time he'd gotten to know who he really was, and he'd gone with him, and they had visited a different planet, in a different time… but he couldn't tell anyone.

In a way he guessed he understood why it had to be this way, going off of what the Doctor had told him, but at the same time… He had kept secrets in his life, sure. He had kept one that had felt so big in his chest, for so long, and whether or not people said they'd known all along, it didn't matter. He had kept that secret. He would have to keep this one, too, and even though it was something else entirely, he would give it the same care and attention.

"Kurt!"

He paused at the sound of Blaine's voice, and he turned to find his boyfriend dashing toward him. It would be his first test, if not the biggest.

"Hey, what happened?" Blaine asked before Kurt was able to get a word in, and now he paused, hesitating. What was he referring to, did he know?

"I…" he started, uncertain.

"I haven't seen or heard from you since Friday, I was worried," Blaine said, and Kurt let out a breath.

"I'm sorry, I had so much to do, school work I'd been falling behind on, so I ended up off in my own bubble, you know? Trying to get things done," he lied, hoping he sounded truthful. "I mean to call you, but I was just in that place, head wise," he gestured.

"Oh," Blaine replied, and Kurt kept silent, so he might see whether he'd believed him or not. "So did you get it all done?"

"Yeah," Kurt smiled. "I'll have to make sure that doesn't happen again," he breathed a put-upon sigh of relief he thought for a moment might have been too much, but either Blaine was too preoccupied with something, or Kurt was a much better actor than he'd believed himself to be. "What's wrong?"

Blaine looked at him, and Kurt could tell he wanted to say something but knew he shouldn't. He was fighting his conscience on it, trying to decide what he'd do.

"Blaine?" Kurt frowned. His boyfriend sighed.

"I need to tell you about something. Follow me."

Whatever he meant to tell him, it seemed very important that it be heard by Kurt and no one else. If Blaine had led him off to have this conversation as early as three days ago, he would have been leading a clueless Kurt around the halls of McKinley, who had not any idea at all what he was about to be let in on. Instead, this was today, and today Kurt was as sure as anyone could be that he was about to be told about the Doctor. He could just see it in Blaine's face, and he wasn't sure why. He knew his boyfriend would someday have met the Time Lord, too, and gone on an adventure with him, eventually asking the Doctor if he might take Kurt along someday, too, but he knew it hadn't happened yet. Of course, again, it wasn't just that Kurt had met the Doctor before and thus was going into this informed. He had also been given some amount of information by the woman he'd first known as Ginny Harrison. He still found it incredible to think he, or anyone else at their school, would have known all this already.

When they'd finally gotten to someplace where Blaine felt comfortable to talk, he had done that much. He'd told him about how he'd gotten a letter, in his own handwriting, a letter from his future self. Kurt had stared at him, and the mix of shock and disbelief hadn't been all that farfetched.

"Your… future self?" he asked, and Blaine nodded. "You know there are such things as forgeries," Kurt pointed out.

"No way, this one was real, the things it said… it could only have come from me," Blaine assured him, with some small amount of shyness in him all of a sudden.

"Wow…" Kurt blinked.

"Oh, I know, but there's more," Blaine went on. He told him how he'd run into Quinn, and how one thing had led to another, where he had discovered that she had met this man called the Doctor, who was an alien who could travel in time and space, just like the letter from the future Blaine spoke of. "And it's not just her, most of the Glee Club's met him apparently." Now this one caught Kurt off guard.

"Most? How much is most?" he asked.

"All but a handful, more than half," Blaine estimated, and even as he said this, he looked nervous. "They made me promise not to tell anyone," he admitted. "But I couldn't… I had to tell you," he went on, and Kurt smiled.

"I'm glad you did," he said, and this much was true. "So… an alien?" he asked, sharing in the quiet conspiracy. The whole idea of this secret he'd been sharing with 'most of the Glee Club' had been something thrilling for him to have, and he'd wanted to share that with Kurt, too, and in that moment Kurt understood more than ever why he needed to keep the secret, until events ran their course, and this future Blaine came across the Doctor, travelled with him, and those events carried on into the Time Lord deciding to make good on a request not yet made.

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	6. The Old & the New

_A/N: Still a day behind... I am blaming this one on the packing frenzy... Three weeks 'til I move!_

**"A Common Cause"**

**6. The Old & the New**

_Coreidis – in the year 2019_

The first thing Kurt would notice when the doors to the TARDIS opened out in front of him was the dust and its smell. Immediately, the whiff he got reminded him of the ocean, the last vacation he had been on with both his mother and father. His mother had not been feeling well, so she'd stayed on the beach, which was just fine by Kurt, because he was scared of going into the water and feeling things under his toes that he couldn't see. He would run to her and she would smile and open her arms to him… His father would try and coax him back out, promising that the water was great and nothing would eat his feet. He hadn't even been thinking about anything biting him and that had put the last nail in the coffin of his ever accepting to go in there. Instead he'd stayed on the beach, resting with his mother and trying to read the book she was reading with her. With the turn of events soon to follow, they would be some of his most cherished memories.

So when he smelled it here, his first exposure to an alien world left him with tears in the corners of his eyes, though not nearly for the reason that he was on an alien world.

"You alright?" the Doctor asked, and Kurt blinked, breaking out of his reverie.

"Fine, yeah," he promised, trying to bat away his tears before they could be seen. "I promise," he added, nodding to the Doctor. "Are we close to the ocean?"

"Nowhere near," the Doctor shook his head.

"But I can smell it," Kurt insisted.

"Oh, yes," the Doctor blinked, standing back tall as though remembering something he'd been meant to share. "That'll be the dust, yeah," he pointed here and there. "Has a way of playing with your head. Tell you what, you really don't want to breathe it in when you're hungry, makes you smell all kinds of things that'll have you chewing your fingers if you're not careful. Last time I came here all I could smell were chips, and they can't make them descent here, I had to stop and get a load of them once I'd gotten back to Earth," he sighed, took a breath. "All good now though."

"What does it smell like to you now?" Kurt asked, still not entirely sure he understood what was happening. The Doctor didn't answer. Instead, he ushered his companion out of the ship and pointed to a building nearby.

"Do you know what they do here? There are these siphons, collecting dust particles out of the sky. Not enough to deplete the supply, but enough to serve its purpose."

"Where does the dust come from?" Kurt asked and, at the Doctor's look, "Well if they're concerned it might run out, there might be a place that it comes from… right?"

"I like the way you think," the Doctor nodded, genuinely impressed, then sniffed. "In this case however, the answer is simple. The dust just is," he held his hands out. "Or, if you want to be entirely precise, the clouds expel it on a continual basis, so it permeates the air, it's absolutely fine to breathe in, and it always smells some way that makes you happy, so really what's there to complain about? Can we move on now?"

"So these guys, the ones you said got away, they're here now?" Kurt asked.

"Nearby," the Doctor confirmed.

"How near?"

"Well, if I had to guess," the Doctor took Kurt's arm and tugged him slowly to the right. As he did so, they began to see a second building revealed from behind the factory. Where the factory looked as though it had withstood the test of time for any number of decades, the second building looked as though it could have been finished just days ago. "I don't, of course, and neither do you. Ever since the new factory was opened, it's been hard days for everyone in the old one, some loyalties divided, because some chose to jump ship, for supposedly better conditions, or so I would gather."

Kurt was doing his best to keep on listening to the Doctor, but he was finding it difficult, in great part due to the fact that he was breathing this strange but altogether wonderful dust, but also that he was seeing everything around him. There were people, walking everywhere, and they looked for the most part as human as he did, as human as the Doctor, though he could believe the man was alien. If he had to go by the inhabitants of this world, whose name he still didn't know, he could have assumed this was all a hoax and he was still on Earth somewhere.

But this place, whatever it was, was most definitely not Earth, and seeing it unfold all around him, Kurt was at a loss for words.

He had to find them fast when he heard the Doctor's voice suddenly take a tone less 'allow me to unveil for you the wonders of the universe' and more 'look what the cat's dragged in.'

They had slipped through the doors of the old factory, by means Kurt was still not entirely sure he understood, and the Doctor had been walking them through the halls as though he owned the place, when he'd gone and stopped.

"Oh but not this time," he suddenly muttered, and the next thing Kurt knew the man was running and he was forced to chase after him.

"What are you doing? What's going on?" he asked, but the Doctor wouldn't answer. Still, it didn't take Kurt long to realize the pair of them were running in the same general direction as a girl running ahead of them… No, they were chasing her.

The Doctor was a much faster runner than Kurt was, and the boy had trouble keeping up. He had given up calling after the alien man, trying to find out what was happening, because he had already understood the Doctor would not reply. Maybe if he had kept on calling out to him, the Doctor might have caught on, sooner or later, to the fact that he had abruptly been silenced, but as he hadn't, and so when a girl had yanked Kurt into a room and shut the door, the Doctor had only kept chasing the brunette he'd sighted.

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	7. The Honest Spy

**"A Common Cause"**

**7. The Honest Spy**

_Coreidis – in the year 2019_

The first thing he saw was an eyeful of hair so blond it was veering on white, especially in the glare of the thin light in the room which made the long ponytail shine. He remained fixated on it for what felt like much too long, but finally he saw the face that belonged to the ponytail. The girl couldn't have been any older than he was, and for that he wasn't sure if he should be put at ease or not. Then he saw they weren't alone, and he sided with caution once again.

"What's going on, what…" he started as he was pushed to sit against what he saw to be a crate of some kind, as there were no chairs. There were four of them around him, all of them looking roughly the same age, and all of them wearing similar clothes that could all have been variants of a uniform, all of them with an identical badge; they all worked here, at the factory.

"We know who you are," the blond girl crouched and locked eyes with him; he didn't dare look away. "We saw you."

"I… I only just got here," Kurt defended himself. "I think there's been some kind of mistake."

"Only need to get one look at you to know you're one of them," one of the others declared, a boy with curly brown hair.

"One of who?" Kurt tried to stand up, but one look at those surrounding him made him change his mind. "I'm not who you think I am, I swear. I don't even know who you think I am, but I know I'm not him. My name is Kurt Hummel, I came here with a… a friend," he explained, bypassing any other words that would only have lengthened his need for explanation rather than shortened it.

"We saw him, too," the blond girl nodded.

"Right, so… Look, I'm sure he could explain it better than I can, but I'll say it again, I'm not… I don't even know who you think I'm supposed to be, but I know I'm not him."

"So you're saying you're not from the other factory?" asked a second girl, and if they had been on Earth, Kurt would have pegged her for being Indian, but he remembered they were not on Earth, so he didn't bring it up, afraid she might take the question the wrong way. He was not anywhere near being in a position to argue, so he would suffer his planet displacement headache on his own.

"I've never even been inside that building, how could I be from…"

He didn't know at what point the blond girl had decided she'd had enough, but he caught a flash of her ponytail right before everything went dark.

When he started regaining consciousness, he could smell something sweet like syrups on pancakes, and he wondered if the strange dust was in the air again, but then he opened his eyes and realized it was the smell of actual cooking, not dust. There was a stove top sort of station in the corner of the room, and the curly haired boy was manning it. He wasn't in the same room he'd been in a moment before – a moment or however long he'd been unconscious… He had been moved here, and he'd been laid out on a mattress on the ground.

The Indian-looking girl and the fourth of his captors, who'd been a boy with a shaved head, were absent from sight as he looked around, but the blonde was still there, sitting a few paces away, glaring at him; she wasn't going to leave him out of her sight. Kurt slowly sat up, reached to the side of his head and winced. There was no blood, but there'd be a bump under there without a doubt.

"Was that really necessary?" Kurt looked at her. He might have wanted to show some amount of fear, but really he was just annoyed and he wasn't going to hide it. The girl looked at him like she would have loved nothing more than to either hit him again or give him the equivalent in words, but she'd been stopped, and it frustrated her.

"Della would apologize, but she's too stubborn for that," the curly haired boy spoke, and Kurt turned to look at him just as he brought a plate over and handed it over. Kurt hesitated, looking at it. The food looked good, smelled good, and Kurt was definitely hungry, but what was to say it wasn't poisoned, after everything? As a sign of good faith, no doubt guessing his concerns, the boy had taken a bite to show it was safe, and Kurt had finally taken the plate. The boy sat next to the blond girl called Della. "My name is Corius. Your name is Kurt, that's what you said, yes?"

"Yes," Kurt confirmed, once he'd swallowed his first and second bites. "This is really good," he had to say, and Corius smiled. He didn't look nearly as threatening as the girl who kept staring daggers at him, so Kurt decided to tempt his fate with the boy. "Where am I?" he asked.

"Still in the factory," Corius told him. "This is our own place, some of us use it during our breaks," he explained. "Please understand, we mean you no harm."

"Is that right?" Kurt asked, tossing a look to the girl, who crossed her arms, further cementing her appearance as a sulking child.

"Things are tense enough these days that some of us have come to believe there may be spies in our midst," Corius explained.

"Spies… from this new factory?" Kurt guessed.

"Yes," said the boy, then realizing, "You're not from here, are you?" Anyone who was would have known, Kurt guessed, and he wasn't sure what to say at first, but then it all came along.

"I'm not," he said. "How bad is it?"

"Very," Della spoke, the first Kurt had heard of her since before she'd knocked him out.

"I have to ask, if you're not from here, and you're not a spy, then what are you doing here?" Corius asked. Again, Kurt hesitated, and again the answer was there.

"I'm here because of my friend, the one I was telling you about. All I know is he took me here because there were some people who needed help. I think he meant you. That's what I'm doing here. I'm here to help."

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	8. The Shimmer Girl

**"A Common Cause"**

**8. The Shimmer Girl**

_Coreidis, in the year 2019_

There were several things that escaped the Doctor as he chased after the girl he still called Shimmer Girl. The first and perhaps most glaring of all was that he'd lost Kurt in the shuffle, but this one would remain unseen to him for a while longer. A second realization would however come upon him, as he ran after her, at first along a corridor and then through a door and back into the daylight outside the factory. He wasn't sure what it was, but suddenly he had a thought that she might not even know he was running after her or, if she did, she might not actually have known it was him. He had only run after her because she'd started running, and he'd assumed it was that she'd seen him.

He would have plenty of time to contemplate his personal feelings of stupidity later. As it was, he was just about to catch up to her. Without so much as trying, he had brought about her stopping. She'd seen the TARDIS, and then she'd skidded to a stop. He didn't know why he did it, but he pulled out his sonic screwdriver, and when the girl whipped back and saw it, her reflex was to reach in her pocket and pull out what he soon saw looked an awful lot like what he was brandishing. It wasn't the same, no, but it only took one quick look to realize they were roughly meant to be the same.

She stood still, and so did he, neither of them knowing what to do or say. The nameless girl had not expected to run into him this way, and the Doctor was once again surprised by her, or in this case by what she held.

"I didn't think you'd be…" she said, panting.

"What's that?" he asked, nodding to the object she held. She seemed to remember herself now, and as she went on, she discreetly slipped the thing back in her pocket.

"Were you running after me, Doctor? How's that for a change?" she smirked, and she was back in her quips, which he could tell very well were her way of keeping a distance firmly planted between them so he wouldn't be able to read through her too much.

"You had a sonic…" he put his own away.

"I did not," the girl insisted.

"Oh, don't play that, now, you've done nothing but follow me around but I can tell you're smarter than that." She stared at him, barely holding down a smirk.

"I'll take that as a compliment?" He was still staring at her. "It's not a sonic, I swear. Really not."

Something about the way she said it, the Doctor wasn't sure if she wanted him to understand something, or if her tone only suggested it. He wouldn't say what he was thinking and let her have another quip, but he understood. The anti sonic… He'd been toying with the idea, in quiet moments and down times for years already, but he'd never gotten around to it. She'd made references to being from his future before, so was this just one more thing to prove it? Wouldn't be the first time…

"Tell me this then," he sized her up, choosing to redirect their conversation. "Why'd you run?"

"It's faster than walking?" she shrugged. "And here I thought you were a fan of the running."

"Stop it," he spoke, looking her in the eye, and her eyes twitched. "I understand."

"Do you?" she asked.

"Well, you know me," he shrugged. "But I don't know you yet, is that so?"

"Getting warm," she conceded.

"So I guess the more important question is why you'd ever be here, and the answer to that would again have to do with me, which leaves you in a bit of a tight spot. You can't talk, and you know I'll see through you the moment I get the chance, so you won't let that happen. How warm am I now?" She said nothing. "Far be it for me to jeopardize a thing," he added, and she understood his message: he wouldn't prod, but she had to level with him.

"You're here with Kurt, aren't you?" she asked.

"You know about him?" the Doctor asked.

"More than you do," she nodded. "Where is he?" He stopped, looking back, and when he looked at her again he looked nervous. "You might want to go and find him. Right now you need him more than you need to worry about me, so go on then. You do what you have to do and I'll do the same."

"Why were you running?" he asked again; he knew he was about to lose her again. She just smiled and shrugged, and she stepped behind the TARDIS. He didn't have to walk around the ship to know she'd be gone by then.

She was right about one thing, he did need to do what he'd come here to do, but his feelings in recent times had been left to scramble, and running after the girl who'd eluded him all this time had seemed like a good alternative to everything else. Now she was gone again, and it was back to… everything.

It took him a while to find Kurt, longer than he would care to admit, so much time wasted walking along corridors. When he did find him again, he was accompanied by a boy and girl roughly his age, a girl with white-blond hair, and a boy with brown curls.

"You've made friends?" the Doctor asked calmly.

"Where did you go?" Kurt was somewhat less calm. "You left, and I got… assaulted," he threw a look back to the girl, who wouldn't look at either of them.

"Kurt said you might be able to help us," the boy piped in, and the Doctor turned to him, nodding after a moment. "Our shift is nearly done. When it's over, you can come with us."

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	9. Back in the Day

**"A Common Cause"**

**9. Back in the Day**

_April 2012 – Lima, Ohio – Monday_

Blaine had realized perhaps too late that maybe his telling Kurt the truth would cause some problems. So after they'd both gone their separate ways, Blaine had gone in search of the one or more of the girls, whoever he could come across. If he had to get them all together it might take too long, and he wanted to make sure they knew from him before they found out through someone else, in this case Kurt.

He found all but one of them in the end. Quinn and Mercedes had been talking when he approached them.

"I need to talk to you about something," he started, looking around. "Actually it's something I have to tell you, really… I hope you won't be upset," he explained.

"What did you do?" Mercedes asked, frowning.

"Nothing," he stood up straight. "Nothing, I swear, except… I told Kurt." The girls looked to one another, and if any message passed between them, it never caught hold of Blaine's attention.

"Oh…" Quinn responded. "Well that's…"

"What are you guys up to?" a new voice joined them, and Blaine startled before he saw it was Santana, with Brittany behind her.

"We're not… 'up' to anything," he vowed.

"Tell that to your face," Santana stared back at him.

"He told Kurt about the Doctor," Mercedes revealed, and for what shouting match he had expected, Blaine instead got what could only be described as nonchalance.

"Oh, alright," Santana nodded slowly.

"Did he freak out?" Brittany asked.

"Not really," Blaine shrugged, thinking back. "Actually, he took it pretty well. There wasn't all that much to say, maybe that helped? I couldn't even tell him what he looked like." The girls did the same thing again, looking at each other with knowing looks, only now Blaine saw it, and when they looked back at him, they were of one mind.

"Well, there's one thing we haven't really told you about yet," Quinn explained. "We didn't know how well you'd take it or if you'd believe us when we told you about it. It's completely true, we swear, it's just… a bit hard to trust if you haven't seen it with your own eyes."

"What is it?" Blaine asked, evidently curious now. Quinn, Santana, and Brittany all turned to Mercedes, as though she'd be better suited to explain it than anyone else.

"There's this thing that he does, I don't know," she struggled for the words, lacking some aspects of the explanation herself. "He can sort of… change his face."

"Like a shape shifter?" Blaine's eyes bulged.

"No, not that," Mercedes shook her head. "It's all of him that changes, almost like he's a new person, but it's really still him, I swear. I met three of them."

Blaine had heard her story, from when she'd met the Doctor, and he'd gotten the distinct impression that there was something he wasn't understanding, something he was missing. She'd never actually said how they were different, because at the time the girls and the guys, too, had decided maybe they should wait before dropping that detail in, until both Blaine and Sam were properly in their trust. They'd come to the conclusion now that Blaine was ready to hear it, whether it was that they didn't have much of a choice or not, and it seemed they were right, because he didn't need more convincing than he'd gotten, and now he was rolling right along.

"Wait, so how many are there?" he asked.

"Eleven," Mercedes started to say.

"No, there's twelve, there's Artie's girl one," Brittany reminded.

"Wait, what?" Blaine's head turned from one to the other.

"Yeah, the one Artie saw was a woman, that's the twelfth one," Quinn explained.

"The rest of us only met one of the three before her," Santana followed. "Except her, who met the three," she indicated Mercedes again.

It came as a bit of a jumble, but the girls alternated describing the Doctors they had met, from Quinn's Eleventh, all "limbs and bowties" according to her, to the Ninth, who Mercedes described as having "these ears" while she mimed it, her hands ghosting to indicate a pronounced nose as well, and the Tenth as well, with the pronounced hair and the long flapping coat, as Santana and Brittany alternated in describing. In all their cases, it seemed a permeating quality among all the Doctors they'd met was a sort of quiet sadness, mixed with anger.

Something that caught Blaine off guard though was that, as each description was being given, he would try and create an image in his head, and on the last one, the image felt as though it was based in reality, like he'd met this person before. He couldn't explain it, and he asked them to describe him some more, until finally he knew what it reminded him of. How he even remembered it was a miracle, seeing as he'd only briefly seen him and the woman, when he'd turned after their performance at the Gap to look for Kurt and found him with the pair, but he vividly remembered them, and now he had to wonder…

He told the girls about that day at the Gap, the man, the redheaded woman… Could it have been that this man was the Doctor they were talking about, that he'd met him already after all? He'd had no idea that this person could ever be an alien, he'd looked so human, and the thought gave him chills.

"Look, it's fine, with you telling Kurt about the Doctor," Quinn told Blaine. "But you can't go around telling everyone, okay?"

"Yeah, no, I understand, it was just… it's Kurt," he couldn't help but smile.

"I know," Quinn promised, and Mercedes nodded, as did Brittany, and eventually – if grudgingly – so did Santana. Before long, they would need to sit down with Kurt, to have a proper talk with him. They knew somehow that his finding out must have fit into the grand scheme of things more than they realized, but they wouldn't get ahead of themselves.

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	10. Past Unspoken

**"A Common Cause"**

**10. Past Unspoken**

_April 2012 – Lima, Ohio – Monday_

It wasn't that she'd really planned for this, but when Sugar received Brittany's text, which told her about Blaine and how he'd told Kurt about the Doctor, the response had been almost immediate. She had to go and let Gemma know.

She hadn't gotten around to talking to her, one on one, since it had all been revealed about who she really was, not the way Sugar would have wanted it, and now she had a reason to initiate things. She'd been going around with this fear like the woman would shut her out. But the more time went by, the more convinced she became that this wouldn't be so, that she would be kind to her, all things considered. At this point she was willing to chance anything, if it meant that she'd have a shot at talking to someone.

She was glad to find the fake substitute still in her class, and on her own. She slipped through the door and closed it, which got the woman's attention.

"Sugar?" Gemma closed the textbook she'd been looking into. "Everything okay?" she stood. Sugar took a moment, looking around, like she expected to find someone waiting to pounce.

"Just… I wanted to let you know… Well, Blaine told Kurt, about the Doctor," she nodded.

"Oh," Gemma responded.

"That's alright, isn't it?" Sugar asked, concerned.

"What, no, of course it is," Gemma went on, remembering herself. "Is that all?" she asked then, and Sugar wondered if she'd seen through her face, seen what was hidden there. She was coming forward, and seeing the open concern there, Sugar took a breath and let it out.

"I was hoping we could talk… I mean, really talk, not just… well… Now that I know who you really are, then I know that you know who I really am, too… Don't you?" she asked, hesitant. Gemma had a look on her face at this, the same nervous tick Sugar had about the subject of her origins ever being spoken of. "The thing is I've never gotten to talk… to anyone… and I can pretend a lot about how it doesn't bother me… I've had a lot of practice… But it does, you know? Bother me, that is…" She hadn't felt so exposed in a long time, and they hadn't even said anything, except…

"You've been Sugar longer than you've been anyone else, haven't you?" Gemma pointed out.

"I can live here all my life and be Sugar, but I'll always have been…" She looked around again, the name burning on the tip of her tongue, begging to be spoken, while her eyes did her brain's work, looking for any indication that letting the word out would be dangerous.

"Padra," Gemma said it first, and the sound fluttered in the girl's heart, as she stood before the Doctor's companion. "You'll always have been Padra first," she finished the statement, and Sugar nodded. "How much do you remember, about your old home, about… about your family?"

To behold her now, as the girl from the future was allowed to step out from behind the mask that was Sugar Motta, it was incredible to see how different she truly was, how much the girl had survived underneath it all; she had never lost her true identity.

"I remember it all. The faces are harder, sometimes. I'll look in the mirror, and I'll try to see them, my mother and my father. I did look like them, I remember everyone telling me. I remember the house, mostly in details, like how the windows in my room were colored, and how the sun would come in and send those colors all over," she smiled. "I remember Toh, him and all my friends…"

The more she would allow the memories to come unbound, the more the emotion rumbled through her chest, and she could feel the tears rising.

"Some days I hate having to be… all this," she gestured to herself. "Some days I don't want to be her… Sugar Motta. I just want to be myself, and I want to be home, and have my family back… And then I feel awful, because I do have a family, and they love me so much, but they have no idea. They don't know the truth and I can't tell them, not even them…"

"Su… P…" Gemma tried to speak, to comfort her, but she couldn't even get past something as simple as a name, because for this girl it wasn't simple at all.

"Can't I just tell them?" Sugar begged now. "I know it's been years and I haven't told them yet, but look… Nothing's happened to me, no one's come, right? So maybe it's safe to tell them, and my friends here… I could just be me," she rambled on, trying to sound convincing, so maybe Gemma would say yes.

"Sugar…" Gemma spoke, and this one was very intentional. It set the tone, and she could see Sugar had gotten it, too. "I'm sorry, but this is just how it has to be." She was sorry, Sugar could see it, but it didn't make it any easier not to feel resentment of some sort toward her. She let it sit there and hurt a while, but then she let out a breath and the hurt went out with it.

"I know it is," she promised.

"But you're right about one thing, we do both know who the other really is now, so if you ever need to talk, and let Padra out for a little bit, you know where to find me," Gemma went on, an encouraging smile on her face. It made Sugar smile, too.

"Thank you," she said, though her face said 'this means more to me than you could ever imagine.' She dove into the woman's arms, and startled though she was, Gemma eventually returned the hug, holding on to the girl who had been – who still was – Padra, counting herself for being representative to the family the girl had lost, the ones who'd been privileged in knowing her by her true name and heart.

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	11. Two Sides, One Table

**"A Common Cause"**

**11. Two Sides, One Table**

_Coreidis, in the year 2019_

While they'd waited for Della and Corius and the others to finish their shift, the Doctor had insisted on inspecting Kurt's head, after finding out about its encounter with Della's swing. There was something in the way the alien man looked after him, a distraction, and Kurt wanted to ask after it, but he couldn't bring himself to do it, so he held his tongue. What was important, he guessed, was that his head would be fine, and save for a tenderized bump, there'd be no further consequence.

Eventually the two factory workers had come to find them, and the Doctor and Kurt were escorted off to their house. It was as they went that they learned that Della and Corius were sister and brother, had been since they'd both been four years old and Corius had been adopted into the family. It was only after they'd welcomed the young orphan into their home that they'd learned he and Della coincidentally shared a birthday, and from that day on the blond girl had welcomed the curly boy on as her brother and her twin. If they hadn't understood how fiercely protective she was of him before, they knew it now.

At the house, the visitors discovered the boy and girl didn't lack for siblings, or family in general. It didn't seem there should have been enough space for all of them, but no one seemed to be complaining, not their mother or father, or their brothers and sisters - six of them - or their grandmother and grandfather, or their aunt and her two sons. The Doctor and Kurt walked into this, into a loud house full of people preparing for dinner. When Della and Corius' mother learned they'd be two more to eat, she went right along with it and set two more plates.

It wasn't until everyone started to sit that they began picking up on some tense notes. The parents sat at one end, the grandparents on the other, and along each length of the table there sat the eight children, their aunt, and their cousins. Six sat on one side, five on the other - seven with their guests. The six on one side wore the same style of uniforms the Doctor and Kurt recognised for being from the old factory, while the five across from them wore the sleek and identical uniforms of the new factory.

Before long, saying that things were tense seemed to be going in for as understated as a statement could ever be. Kurt looked around the table and expected that at any moment someone would tackle another across the table, or that some kind of shouting match would begin. Those on the old factory side, and even those on the ends, all seemed so at odds with those of the new factory that, just sitting on the bench there, they felt the gazes and they wondered if they should be apologizing for something... anything.

The dinner was by no means quiet; the house had an endless supply of constant sound. But if the Doctor or Kurt bothered to listen to the words unsaid as much as those who were said, they would come to pick up on what was really going on, thanks to the passive aggressive conversation.

It used to be that they all worked at the old factory, a tradition in their family going back generations, proudly so. Then the new factory came along, and at first nothing changed. They were loyal and would continue being loyal.

But then time passed, and recruitment was a rousing success at the new factory. Before too long, one of the siblings had transfered - defected, as far as the old factory side of the table named it - to the new factory. Then there went another, and another... Now three of the siblings, the aunt, and one of the cousins were with the new factory. Those still at the old factory made it clear where they stood on the matter; the transfers remained oddly calm about it ahim

Kurt wondered briefly why Corius had brought them here; he didn't see this ever being Della's idea, as the girl still looked at him like she only trusted him so long as she had her eye on him. But the more the dinner progressed, the more he came to understand. The boy wanted him and the Doctor to see what had become of his family since the new factory had come along. It wouldn't have surprised him to learn this was happening in other homes as well. This dinner invitation was Corius' call for help.

After they had all finished eating, Kurt had gone aside and signaller for the Doctor to follow.

"So what do we do now?" Kurt asked.

"Well, there's no point going anywhere now, the factories are shut until morning, and we need to see what's happening during active shifts more than anything."

"Wait, morning..." Kurt hesitated. It was only now coming on to him to remember how they had just left. As much as the Doctor had assured him how everything would be fine, he still needed to hear it repeated.

"I will take you back when all this is done and they won't know a thing," the Doctor vowed.

"Alright, well... What's the plan?" Kurt asked, then, "You have a plan, right?"

"Of course I have a plan, what do I look like? Don't answer that. We'll sleep the night off, and tomorrow morning we will walk through the door over at the new factory, find who is in charge - I have a strong idea who that is - and then we will deal with all this, yes," the Doctor looked energized, on the swing of things. "Yes, good, molto bene," he carried on, and as he paused, Kurt stared at him. He just smiled to himself, the kind of private smile that Kurt knew would be falling along into that category of things he would not ask after.

Though Della and Corius' father insisted they could stay the night at the house, the Doctor took Kurt back to the TARDIS. He set the boy up with a room of his own and left him there. When Kurt was changed and lying down, he closed his eyes and he thought of home, of his father, of Blaine... They might never know, not for a while, but he would do this for them.

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	12. To the Right

**"A Common Cause"**

**12. To the Right**

_Coreidis, in the year 2019_

It was hard not to be disoriented waking up in a strange room after the kind of day he'd had before this, but after a few moments Kurt remembered that, no, it had not been a dream. He had really run off with an alien, on his ship, to another world at another time. He tried to imagine this older Blaine who would have travelled with him, and done one thing or another, and then asked the Doctor to take Kurt out there, too. He was equally confused as to why the Doctor would come and fill in this request now, when Blaine hadn't yet made it, which now forced Kurt to keep it secret. He must have had his reasons, right?

Eventually he had left the room and gone to find the Doctor. They had both gone out for breakfast and Kurt understood now what he'd meant about smelling the dust when you were hungry. He must have had two whole breakfasts with how famished he felt. The whole way to the restaurant he remembered his grandmother's cookies, and he just wanted to eat.

Before he knew it, they were walking off toward the factories, and he was stuffed. They came across Della and Corius and the others, and they joined them on their way, joining the shuffle of workers on their way in for their shift. There were so many of them, for both factories, all marching in the same direction and even then the separation existed. The old factory folk would look on to the others, from the new factory, with clear disdain. The others didn't seem all too bothered in truth; they were going along, identical uniforms, almost identical marches. They weren't moving in formation, but they might as well have.

"Keep an eye on me," the Doctor whispered to Kurt.

"What does that mean?" Kurt frowned.

"It means if I change course, you follow," the Doctor clarified.

"Right. Okay. I can do that." The Doctor turned to give him a look that seemed to say something to the effect of 'well I certainly hope so.' "Look I'm sure this is just a normal day for you, but for me it's not, I just need to make sure."

"Normal day..." Kurt thought he heard the alien mumble, though in the next moment he folded himself into a new section of the crowd, and Kurt had to hurry to follow or he would lose him.

It would have been easy for no one to notice a thing, with how many people were going along, which for the most part meant that you either looked forward or risked getting trampled. But then the Doctor and Kurt were still kept in the suspicious eye of the blond Della, and when she spied them diverting off into the monochrome throngs, she tapped her brother's arm and pointed for him to follow her.

"It'll be easy getting through the door," the Doctor told Kurt. "Everyone is coming in now, it might be our only chance. But as soon as we pass the doors, we will need to slip away, before the identification can begin, understand?"

"Got it. What happens if they catch us?"

"I'd rather not find out."

As the Doctor had estimated, they were able to pass through with the others, and before they could reach the arches where the workers were to swipe their identification, which was in a chip in their sleeve, the Doctor took Kurt's hand and yanked him aside. They scrambled into hiding, but they'd barely gotten there that they were brought face to face with two more who were as misplaced as they were.

"What are y..." Kurt started to ask, while the Doctor instead pulled the brother and sister into hiding with them, bringing everyone to crouch out of view. "What are you doing here?" Kurt finished his question now.

"What are WE doing here? I could ask you the same thing!" Della frowned. "I knew that was all lies, you ARE spies!"

"Alright, there's no time for a rhyme..." the Doctor told her, then paused to smirk, realizing he'd just gone and done one, too. Seeing the look on her face, he put it aside. "And I hope this is the last time I need to tell you this, but we are not spies, not for them."

"What?" Corius asked.

"We told you we were here to help you, and that's the truth. We are here to spy, yes, but on them, for you." Whether Della was entirely convinced was left to be seen, but she looked momentarily open to hearing them out. "You two need to go and get back to your factory. The less of us who are caught, the better, especially us, seeing as we are strangers, ones they can't identify."

"I'm not letting you out of my sight. Whatever you're doing, I'm going, too," Della insisted, before turning to her brother.

"I'm not leaving you either," he told her before she could even suggest it.

"Corius..."

"No, that's the end of it. If you stay, I stay."

"Great, whole gang's here," the Doctor cut to the chase. "Now we are going to go, and we will be very quiet, if we don't want that lot coming after us, understood?" he asked the entire group, though his gaze went to Della once again, identifying as the wild card element. She sighed, but she nodded.

So, they moved out of their hiding space, and not a minute later, they were brought face to face with a pair who were clearly not workers but security.

"Hello," the Doctor ran right along with it. "Say, I do believe we have gotten ourselves turned around a bit, is the gift shop this way, or one floor up?" he pointed.

"Identification," one of the security guards demanded.

"Oh, that, well..." the Doctor started patting at his sleeves, his pockets, and Kurt had the nagging feeling as quick of a thinker as he had been, he wouldn't be able to get them out of this.

"It's alright, they're with me," a woman's voice called, from up the hall, and they all looked up. "New recruits, on their way to orientation. This one thinks he's a comedian," Gemma frowned at the Doctor, who gaped, trying to decide whether he should be surprised to see her, or just mildly insulted. He did catch her eyes flick to the side, and he quickly understood what this meant. Kurt's eyes had bugged out at the sight of his substitute teacher in this place, and if the Doctor didn't tend to him, he would give them away.

"Terribly sorry, first day jitters," he shrugged, all the while taking Kurt's arm, giving it a squeeze so he would stay silent.

"As you were," Gemma told the guards, and after a moment they left. She turned to the Doctor. "You got lucky this time, be careful," she told him before walking away.

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	13. More Important Things Than

**"A Common Cause"**

**13. More Important Things Than**

_Coreidis, in the year 2019_

It had taken a few minutes of quiet and rapid walking, minding that they were somewhere they weren't supposed to be and had already almost been caught once, before Kurt was able to let the words that had been gathering up in his throat in the meantime. When the Doctor had them duck into a small room and shut the door, he could hold himself back no longer.

"What was she doing here?" he blurted out. The Doctor stared at him, hesitating.

"Do you know her?"

"Of course I do, she's a substitute teacher at my school!"

"Kurt, I understand this is probably very confusing to you right now, but need I remind you we are hiding?" the Doctor pressed on the last word. He couldn't admit to him how he was feeling like being a bit shouty himself, coming across his shimmer girl and learning he may have her identity held in this boy he'd chanced to seek out. "Now this teacher..."

"Miss Harrison, Ginny Harrison, she's been with us for months now, on and off, that was her, I know it was, but how is that possible, she's not from here, she..."

"Kurt, I'm sorry but for now you'll have to take what I'm about to tell you and hold it as the one explanation I can give you for the time being. I don't know if she's really who she's told you she is, for all we know..." he sighed, "For all we know, the name you know her by may not be her true name. All I can tell you is in a future time, she might be a traveling companion if mine. She's been popping up every so often, following me, and I haven't been able to figure out why, only that she's been growing... bolder, in her last visits."

Kurt couldn't wrap his mind around it. This wasn't a dream, he was sure of it by now, but shouldn't someone you know popping up somewhere impossible be a staple of a crazy dream? He heard the Doctor's words, but they still didn't connect.

He was going to have to find a way to accept it, if only temporarily, he knew. They were in the middle of this situation, their whole reason for being here, and they couldn't get pulled off course for anything, even randomly appearing substitute teachers.

"What's the next move?" he finally asked.

"What do they do?" the Doctor turned to Della and Corius.

"What do you mean?" Corius asked.

"They just went and planted this new factory here, what do they do, what do they produce, the same thing you all do at your factory?"

"They say they do, that they are 'better equipped to gather and purify the dust for distribution.' I don't believe a word they say," Della declared.

"In this instance then I would be inclined to believe you," the Doctor told the girl, and it may have been the first time Della wholly accepted to trust him.

"What do we need to do?" she asked.

"First, let's see what they are so busy doing," he nodded.

When they left the small room, carefully scanning their surroundings before stepping back into view, they went with no clear idea of where they were headed or what they expected to be looking to find, but as not one of them had ever been through these halls before, and they didn't know what they should be searching for, then that was how it would have to be.

"And you're sure they're here?" Kurt allowed himself to ask. "Those people you were after before, the ones who got away?"

"Yes, positive," the Doctor told him.

"Who are they?" Della asked, overhearing.

"Four years ago, they were on another planet, and they set themselves up inside the Isher Academy, a music school. They used some of their best students, children, had them train with an instrument of their creation, meant to mimic the movements required to operate a weapon. They were entranced, made to kill without their knowledge. Twenty children were used in this program. We were only able to save three. Their masters would have had them assassinate three more."

The words weighed as heavily in his voice as it did inside him, and as Kurt listened, he thought of Blaine, imagined how this must have weighed on him, too. Was this why the Doctor had come for him now, so that whenever Blaine returned from this, he could have someone there to comfort him?

"They're the ones who built this factory?" Della asked, never as driven as she was now."

"They are," the Doctor confirmed.

"Doctor?" Corius spoke, and when they looked back, they saw he'd stopped at a door and was pressing his ear to it. "I think we need to go through here." The Doctor sprinted back, pressed his ear, too, reached in his pocket and pulled out a stethoscope, listening again. "What..."

"Shhh," the Doctor pushed his hand over the boy's mouth so he might listen. "Yes, well done, Corius," he pulled back and with a quick assist by the sonic, the door was opened. Having confirmed they could enter freely, the Doctor waved the others through. With the door shut, they all walked forward to find they were facing a large grill, and beyond it, a level down, they could see the workers at their stations.

"What's wrong with them?" Della breathed, stepping up as close as she could. Kurt could see some faces he recognized, faces belonging to those he'd shared dinner with the night before.

It would almost have been impossible to separate them from the rest, if their brother and sister hadn't been there to bring notice to them. If the identical uniforms hadn't already prepared them for what they'd find today, it was almost frightening to witness them all, sitting at equidistant stations, moving almost as one, in precise motions... It couldn't be that they were doing this by choice, no matter how well trained they were.

"It's like I said," the Doctor said, with a quiet rage in him. "They're at their old tricks again, with a new target."

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	14. The Domesticated Companion

**"A Common Cause"**

**14. The Domesticated Companion**

_April 2012 - Lima, Ohio - Monday_

It was the fourth morning in a row that Gemma woke up in Walter's apartment. They never went on meaning for this to be the outcome, but one thing would lead to another, or she'd be falling asleep on the couch... She didn't understand how much she could like waking up in that bed, with him by her side, until she'd woken up the first time, rested, happy... In all the time she spent with him she was only ever herself, not Ginny the fake sub, not even the Doctor's companion, just Gemma Lucas, from New York.

Walter didn't know the whole truth, all the details, but he knew a great deal. He knew when she had been born... or would be born, from his perspective. He knew about her mother, who was an architect, and her father who was a playwright. He knew about her sister, the real Ginny, Ginny Lucas, who was away at school to be a nurse, though Gemma knew she wanted to quit and be an actress. Gemma had been doing her best to convince her to finish her course first, but having been away so long, she had no way of knowing what had become of her sister's situation, and she wouldn't know, not until after this was all over. So on she forged.

In those first few mornings, she had felt a bit of a curiosity over being in Walter's apartment, wanted to take a look around, but then that was just her, and how she could be a bit of a sneak, she decided, so she waited. But after a few more days, she began to find it harder to ignore the curiosity. Walter was still sleeping, so she got out of bed, tugging at the shirt she'd borrowed from him for the night.

She tiptoed up to the bookshelf. Maybe it stemmed from her own habits, but she felt it was easy to figure someone out by the books they kept and how they kept them. He didn't have nearly as many as she had in her apartment, but then neither did small libraries... Even then, his apartment was bigger than hers, and it wasn't just for the lack of book mountains.

She didn't move or show that she knew he was coming up behind her. She'd gotten good enough, traveling as she did, to know when anyone might be sneaking up on her, and if someone meant her harm, and while Walter's approach was every bit of the first, it had nothing of the second. So she played like she didn't hear him coming, and she let him slip his arms around her waist, playing at the surprise before smiling and looking back at him.

"What, you don't have enough back at your place?" he teased. She chuckled, kissing him.

"I'll have you know I was snooping."

"Is that so?" he asked as she turned in his arms. She nodded. "Find anything interesting?"

"I didn't get the chance to," she pointed out, and he gave an understanding nod, pulling back.

"Please, by all means."

"It's no fun when you know about it..."

"Okay, well... I need to go and shower so... snoop away," he indicated the room.

"I can do that," Gemma agreed. "If I get bored though, I know where to find you," she gave him a look and he matched it as though to say 'yes you do.'

After he went, it took her some time to give in to curiosity again. It was like she said, it wasn't the same once he knew. But then she spotted what looked like a small photo album poking out between a couple of books, and it was in her hands before she knew it, regaling her with shots of a younger, rounder Walter, and she bit back a snort.

She was still on her own as far as the future went. She still couldn't make heads or tails of her conundrum. If Walter came to her time, he lost his family, and if she stayed, then she lost hers... She'd never know what became of her little sister...

Could she even do it? That was sort of the question, wasn't it? Not even the part about the choice, but the thing that went hand in hand with either side. Going one place or the other meant her stopping her travels with the Doctor, and she didn't see how she was ready to do that yet. There was so much left to see, and after all the months she'd spent here in Lima, playing schoolteacher, she felt there was nothing she'd want more than an alien world in the vast future. She'd even take a run in with a couple Daleks, that was how hungry she was for adventure.

There'd be days when she felt so foolish for allowing herself to get even closer to him, but she couldn't help herself, and maybe that was telling her something, like no matter what she chose to do, she wanted to be a part of it. It could be in the TARDIS like it could be back here on Earth, and if she stayed... Maybe the Doctor would let her keep the manipulator, then they could alternate, couldn't they? One time and the next, and... She sighed, closing her eyes. That made no sense at all... But the rest did. She would do what it took; she'd fight for him.

When she heard the water turn off, she moved back to sit on the edge of the bed with the small photo album. Walter came along, a towel around him, still dripping. He looked at her, almost lamenting how she hadn't gotten 'bored.'

"Who is this sweet looking boy here?" she asked, presenting him the open album.

"Oh, him," he was almost too adorably shy, and he made her smile.

"I didn't know you played hockey," she showed another picture of him in uniform, same age.

"Because I was terrible. Haven't played in years," he approached. Gemma smiled.

"Tell me more."

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	15. Damaged

**"A Common Cause"**

**15. Damaged**

One moment they had been standing there, the four of them, observing the workers, and then in the very next moment the building gave a violent shake, and a sound filled their ears, something like an explosion.

They wouldn't have known anything was wrong, going by the workers, who didn't so much as look up and ask themselves what had just happened. But quickly and with little to no care as to whether they might get caught or not, the Doctor led Kurt, Della, and Corius out of their vantage point and the four ran to exit the building and see what had just happened. They could hear noises, off in the distance, and they couldn't piece it together, not right away.

They met no resistance, which could be as good a sign as it could be bad. Yes, they were making a clean getaway, but what was keeping the security guards so busy that they didn't come across four intruders?

They finally found their way out, and the clinically pristine new factory gave way to chaos.

A good portion of the old factory had been brought into collapse, to the point that it would be debatable whether or not it could be repaired and returned into operation, or if it would simply be demolished the rest of the way. Debris littered the area, even across the ground which separated the neighboring factories.

Then there were the people, the workers from the old factory. Some could be seen lying in the mess, in telltale stillness. Others were not rising but still moved, weakly, calling for help. Many more were mobile, evacuating from what exit managed to present itself to them. They were still attempting to situate themselves in the shock, though there were those who had now started turning back and approaching the bodies on the ground and in the debris.

"Telman!" Della shouted then, sprinting forward in assistance to the young man who'd sat across from Kurt the night before, her brother. Corius went to help as well.

"What the hell happened?" Kurt asked. His heart had never beat this fast, like it was trying to emulate the chaos he was seeing all around. "Was it like... a-a bomb?" This was not his life, was it? How could this be real? They might have been in that building, all of them, if the Doctor hadn't wanted to investigate the new factory. They couldn't even smell the dust anymore, not that it would have done much for comfort.

"I don't know," the Doctor replied.

"So it could have been an accident?"

The Doctor said nothing, but then he might have been thinking the same thing Kurt did, that with everything they knew about the situation, it would be entirely more plausible that someone had been responsible for this, not an accident.

"Was the new factory damaged at all?" Kurt slowly asked.

"Good question," the Doctor ran along the edge of the building they had just exited, and even as he did, with Kurt behind him, he could see it.

"Shouldn't we help them?" Kurt asked, looking to the people being pulled free.

"We will..." the Doctor promised. "Or we already are, look," he pointed so Kurt would follow his finger and see what he was seeing. There was a beam, from somewhere out of the side of the old factory, and in falling it had gone imbedding itself just about within the new factory's foundation. "I'd be willing to guess this was what sent us in a tumble back in there."

"Okay, but it's nothing, they can fix it later, there are people hurt," Kurt pointed out.

"Yes, I see," the Doctor promised, though he still could not tear his eyes from that beam. It wasn't just that it had fallen, or that it had pierced the ground, it...

"They're alive under here! Help!" a voice had called out then, and immediately, without a need to stop or decide, both Kurt and the Doctor ran forward, same as many others did, in order to help pull those who had become trapped but alive beneath the debris.

"Kurt, you stay back here," the doctor got hold of his arm to stop him.

"Wait, what? Why? They need help, I can..."

"I brought you here..."

"To help, you did," Kurt frowned. "So let me do it."

"Not there, it could be dangerous, and right now you are my responsibility so you will stay back here. If you want to help, get them where they need to be. Triage, you can do that, yes? Now do it, and if you come past this line, it's back to the TARDIS for you." There was an intensity in his eyes, a driven need for Kurt to do exactly as he was told, and so the boy stopped and nodded: he would do as told.

Kurt didn't know how long it was before he stopped moving. As soon as anyone was brought out of the wreckage, he would be the to help direct them into the smaller areas that had been erected with haste. He tried to get everyone's names as they passed, to look at them and remember them, so if he came upon anyone separated from a friend or family member, he might be able to point them in the right direction.

As hard as they all worked, it didn't change the fact that some people did die, and as he saw more of them go by, Kurt felt even more spooked. If he didn't have to keep moving, something to keep his thoughts on the living, he would have lost his energy entirely. He kept going, exhausted, aching, they all did. They wouldn't stop until it was done.

No one had exited from the new factory thus far. No one had come to see what the noise had been, no one came to lend a hand. As far as anyone was concerned, it was any other day in the new factory, while all hell had descended on the old.

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	16. Sit & Breathe

**"A Common Cause"**

**16. Sit & Breathe**

_Coreidis – in the year 2019_

They'd been told to go and sit, take some time to collect themselves so they might return with renewed strength, able to help again where they could be needed. Kurt hadn't wanted to go, but the Doctor had ushered him away, all the way back the TARDIS so they might sit and be able to talk in peace. There was plenty for them to discuss as it was, and the Doctor had a feeling he might have a better chance of getting Kurt to talk if they were back on the ship, away from everyone, away from the chaos.

Watching the boy drag his feet along, the ache and the exhaustion settling into his bones, the Doctor had him take a seat, and before long he'd gone to procure him something to eat, to drink… Kurt held them, but if the Doctor hadn't gone on instructing him to consume them, he might never have done it. Once he'd taken a bite though, his body had taken over, realizing its hunger, and he'd eaten in silence. The Doctor just watched him.

"You alright?" he finally asked him. The boy's eyes were still somewhere else, distant. "Kurt?" He kept eating. "I know it's hard, seeing someone die for the first time…"

"It wasn't… I mean I…" it finally got him talking, only briefly, then he paused again. He knew he wouldn't be able to just brush it aside. "My mother… I wasn't there when she went, but I saw…" The Doctor didn't say anything, didn't say he was sorry for his loss, which Kurt was actually thankful for. In the years since he'd lost her, he found people apologizing for his loss, especially those who'd never known his mother, to be more irritating to him than comforting. He didn't know for sure that the Doctor had kept from saying it for those reasons, but he wanted to believe that he had. He wanted to look at him and see someone who had understood.

"You'll be alright," the Doctor said instead. "It might be a while before it's not so present anymore, but you will get past this, the way everything is now."

"I know," Kurt nodded slowly. There was silence for a few moments, and when he'd looked up, Kurt had found the Doctor still staring at him. It made him nervous. "What?" he asked.

"If you want me to take you home, at any time…"

"What? Why?" Kurt sat up, ignoring his aching.

"Honestly, I had no idea this would happen, and I never meant to drag you into anything of the sort. You're alright now, you're unhurt, and if I don't do everything I can to keep it that way, then what am I…"

"I'm not leaving," Kurt cut him off. "I want to stay, I want to help those people," he declared. "Please don't send me back."

The words seemed to resonate in the Doctor, and Kurt couldn't explain what it was that it reminded the alien of, but from that point he never once suggested again that Kurt should go back to his own time and world. They were going to get through this, the both of them together, just like the Doctor had meant for it to be.

"Was it them, do you think?" Kurt asked after a moment. It had been easy to jump to conclusions, but that wasn't what they wanted to do, or it wasn't what the Doctor wanted to do, and Kurt agreed with him. But now that more time had gone by, and they'd seen what had and had not happened in the aftermath of the explosion, it was more plausible that they might begin speculating.

"Might be… might not," the Doctor still told him.

"They didn't even come out of there," Kurt frowned. "The old factory is destroyed, and they don't even come out to see or help at all!"

"And that immediately makes them guilty?" the Doctor asked.

"I don't know, sounds like it…"

"For all we know, yes, it could be them, and I wouldn't be surprised at all. But… there's always a chance it's not, and we can't ignore that either."

"You said those people who built the new factory were the same ones who made trouble at that school…"

"And what's there to say that the old factory will be the only one hit? What if whoever made that hit just hit the wrong target?" Kurt's head was spinning.

"So then what do we do?" Kurt was finding the alien's calm demeanor almost troubling, with the way things were happening around them.

"We find the truth, whatever it might be. If you wish to stay here and help, then that's how I'll be doing it, now are you in or not?"

"In," Kurt nodded without hesitation this time. "What's the first move?"

"It's like you said, isn't it? No one's come out of there," the Doctor nodded back out the door. "Do you know why?" Kurt thought.

"You said they were entranced, like the kids from that school," it came back to Kurt then, what they'd seen just before the explosion.

"Work shift should be coming to an end soon, so let's see what happens when it does."

The Doctor had insisted that Kurt remain where he sat, to relax and gather his strength, until such a time as the workers from the new factory would be done working and would exit out into the street, where they would find what happened to the neighboring building. If that was the case, then they could possibly know all they needed to know from the way they'd react. Some of them had loved ones working in that old building, same as anyone else did, and finding what had happened to them might just be the thing to take the clutter from their minds and bring them together again.

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	17. Telling Tales

**"A Common Cause"**

**17. Telling Tales**

_April 2012 – Lima, Ohio_

It was just near to common now for the so-called substitute teacher to drop in to Glee Club, per Mr. Schuester's invitation. In particular this week, Brad the piano player was on vacation, and Will had recruited Ginny to replace him. Even then, he couldn't help himself leading her into a duet to illustrate whatever lesson he meant to pass on to his students.

It was becoming a bit of an inside joke, with so many of them in this room knowing that the woman sitting at the piano wasn't exactly who she said she was. They would watch the others, especially Will, who had no idea, and it would be anyone's guess how long it would take before one of them cracked up and gave it away. Once or twice there had been one of them who had excused themselves to go to the bathroom, all the while covering up their imminent chuckles.

Quinn had been doing her best to keep an eye on all of them, to make sure no one said or did anything they shouldn't, and it was in doing this that she noticed something. She wouldn't give it away, not there in the choir room, but she bid her time, and when the period was over, she went in soft pursuit of the retreating Kurt Hummel.

"Hey, that was great what you did today," she complimented him. It wasn't even stretching the truth all that much. Kurt had had a performance that day, and it had been properly spectacular.

"Thanks," he still sounded surprised when he responded to her.

"No, I'm serious," she promised. "I think maybe it was Gemma, how she played, too, that helped."

"Yeah, she's amazing," Kurt agreed.

"Is Gemma subbing any of your classes right now?"

"No, she's got…" He stopped walking when Quinn came up to sit before him.

"So when did it happen?" she asked point blank.

"When did what happen?" Kurt didn't understand.

"You met the Doctor," she stated. "Recently, I'd say," she nodded.

"Wait, what… Who…" he blinked.

"This isn't the first time Gemma's come into Glee Club, but I've never seen you look at her the way you did today, like something's changed, like you found out something, so that tells me you met the Doctor, as recently as days ago."

"I don't know…"

"I know Blaine's told you about him, and that's one thing, but you've met him now." Kurt went to protest again, but Quinn just smirked. "You realize I've been saying Gemma, not Ginny, since we left the choir room, and you haven't blinked once? Blaine may have told you about the Doctor, but he didn't tell you about her, I know that. So the only way you would have known her real name would be because she told you what it was, and I don't see her doing that unless you'd met the Doctor…" Kurt was cornered, that much he couldn't deny. He let out a breath.

Before long, they had left the school together, and he had told her everything, just about everything, about how the Doctor had come to him and asked for his help, how he'd taken him to Coreidis, how they'd come upon the factories, and then the explosion, and the aftermath, everything they'd done to set things right again before he could come back. He showed her a few bruises, one here on his leg, two on his arms, from being out there, and he confided how he was still sore and aching.

"You can't tell anyone," Kurt shook his head. "She made me swear…"

"I get it, don't worry," Quinn told him. "She made me keep it a secret, too, in the beginning."

"Blaine did say there'd been others who met him, but he hasn't even met him himself. I don't know, but that part almost seemed impossible. Now here you are, with your own… How did you…"

Quinn returned the favor in sharing her own story, about the day of her accident, being whisked away to the circus and meeting the Doctor there, then coming back, having the accident, and meeting Gemma, as herself, being brought into the circle of knowledge, which had kept growing and growing, and now just about included him, although no one else knew that he knew as much as he did.

"So we're okay?" Kurt asked.

"Of course," Quinn smiled. "Just, word of advice, if you plan on keeping it a secret for much longer, you need to be careful about how you behave, especially around Santana. She'll figure you out, same as I did, if you ever give her one inch to spot the truth in."

"Got it," Kurt nodded. "Sometimes it still feels like I must have made it up," he then confided.

"How's that?"

"The place I ended up in, everything I saw, everything that happened, I came back here after that, and it was like night and day, and I was waking up back into the real world. I know it wasn't a dream, I have the marks to prove it, and there's you, and the rest… but sometimes it still feels like it had to have been a dream. Sometimes I think it would have been better off for everyone if it had been…" He didn't want her to see the trauma still in his eyes, but he'd been going along, pretending like he hadn't seen what he'd seen, since he'd come back, and now here was Quinn, giving him an out, allowing him to speak, and it all flooded back.

"I still wonder what happened to all of those people I met sometimes. The ones we took home, the ones that died… I think about how close I came to going out and seeing more worlds instead of ending up back here, in a wheelchair, having to do physical therapy, hoping my legs will work again soon… I can't count how many mornings I wished I had found a way to stay with him on that ship." Kurt put a hand to the blonde's shoulder, and she smiled up at him. "See, we both have our issues, being back. It's a good thing we're not alone."

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	18. The Workers Return

**"A Common Cause"**

**18. The Workers Return**

_Coreidis, in the year 2019_

As hard as it had to be, the Doctor and Kurt had returned to lend a hand once more, to the continuing rescue efforts. With how it was all shaping up, it might have been that they'd be there for hours more, if not days, and all the while, the new factory's doors remained shut. No one seemed to have caught on to this discrepancy the way the Doctor had done, too busy with what they had to do, but they couldn't imagine it would be much longer before someone started to wonder.

Then they'd heard the bells, and they didn't need to be part of that world to know what those meant: end of the work shift, in the undisturbed building. And just like that, within minutes, the new factory's workers had begun to exit, as orderly as ever… that was until they saw what was happening outside.

They paused, and they looked on, absolutely baffled, horrified. What had happened? When had it happened? It wasn't long that many of them jumped into the effort, looking to help, or to find their relatives and their friends. Some also went dashing back into their workplace, and the Doctor took Kurt's arm to lead him aside, where they might be out of view.

"How could they not know someone's putting a trance on them?" Kurt was shaking his head, faced with the strange display before them.

"It might all be part of their trance, that they don't know. They might believe that they've been in there all day, doing their job, being very productive in whatever they're meant to be doing. But this… They'll have their work cut out for them, trying to fit this into their normal day."

The addition of new helping hands was welcomed, and not one of the workers from the old factory asked why the others hadn't come along beforehand; they were just glad for the assistance they received. Kurt didn't see why it was that the Doctor had made them step aside, especially when some of them were still being pulled out and looked after. But then the doors to the new factory opened again, and those who had gone back exited, accompanied by a man and woman. Kurt only had to see them, the way they were received, the way they presented themselves, to know they were in charge. All the same, he guessed they were the people the Doctor was after, the ones he and Blaine had tried to stop, though he could have sworn the Doctor had said there were three, but then the other could have been inside.

As they had walked out, the man and woman had gotten their first look of the scene, and while others had reacted strongly, openly, the pair looked on to the wreck with something almost like detachment. They were efficiently assessing the damage.

"What do we do now?" Kurt asked the Doctor. "We can't just get them right here, can we? Maybe we can slip back in there," he pointed to the new factory. "Then when they try to come back in, that's when we strike." It sounded strange coming from him, and he'd be the first to admit it, but he was doing his best to pitch in.

"We can't," the Doctor said, never taking his eyes away from the man and woman.

"Oh, right... Okay," Kurt said, frowning but searching his brain for other options.

"They know what I look like, they'll remember. But they've never seen you, have they?" Kurt realized now that, when the Doctor had said 'they' couldn't go, he had only meant it so far as he was involved. Kurt was back on track, and he was glad.

"Right, so I can go in there, somehow... I'll say I want to get a job there or something, maybe because... It's safer, what with this explosion over there?" he indicates the old factory.

"Good, yes, good, excellent," the Doctor nodded along, finally looking at him. "Good." He paused then, looking at the boy. Knowing what was necessary had always led him down the right path, but now lately... after Donna... He had gone to find Kurt and brought him here for a specific reason, and he remembered what it was, but he hadn't seen this turn of events come, and now it was more like he was being potentially punished… again… and still at the expense of someone else's life or wellbeing.

But Kurt wanted to do this, and they did need to have someone on the inside, to figure some things out, so if it couldn't be him, the Doctor would have to send the boy. They had gone back to the TARDIS, so that Kurt could be outfitted into something slightly more suited to the role he was meant to take on. At the same time, he was given sufficient information – at least the Doctor assumed it would be sufficient – so that if he ran into trouble, he would have a way out.

By the time they had come back out of the TARDIS, the Doctor and Kurt had found that the man and woman were now addressing the people, both belonging to their factory and to the one which had been hit. To Kurt, it felt very much like PR cover up and nothing more, fake sentiments, meant to present themselves in a favorable light with the people. They looked so very out of place in their own style, amongst those of the old factory, that they would need all the help they could get. He wondered if that might be the way to get through them, if need be, but until there was a need of some sort, he would keep it in his back pocket as an option to use only when absolutely necessary.

While the people of Coreidis were being coddled with fake sentiments, Kurt would be sent on ahead, on his own, to walk through the doors. He hadn't been this nervous in a while, but he needed to keep himself together, to carry on and act as though he belonged.

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	19. A Change Of

**"A Common Cause"**

**19. A Change Of**

_Inside the TARDIS_

Just when he would get it in his head that he was getting used to the Doctor's ship, how it was bigger on the inside and all that, something would come to prove him wrong, and now with hours as a traveller under his belt, having left his planet and his time behind to go and help the people of Coreidis, he thought he was getting a handle on things. And then the Doctor had taken him in to find a change of clothes.

The room was almost seemed a reflection of the ship itself in that there were so many clothes being shown to him that he wondered how they could ever fit in a single room. Then once he actually started looking through the Doctor's selection, for a moment, it had been not so much easy but easier, to stop a moment and forget everything he'd seen outside. There was no danger, he was only browsing, that was all… For being partial to vintage items, this was a gold mine. It took 'vintage' to a whole new level.

"You'll need something to help you fit in," the Doctor reminded him, perhaps realizing what Kurt was thinking as he explored the racks.

"Right, of course," he abandoned the section he'd been going through, trailing on to scan the various styles. He had seen plenty of people out there since they'd arrived, and though most of them were in uniform, either belonging to one factory or the other, he had seen what the others looked like, too, and he had a fair idea of what would help him blend in.

When he'd found a few things, he'd gone to try them on, behind a partition. His own clothes had taken a beating in the triage effort. Rips, and tears, scuffs, stains… He might as well have thrown them out and never looked back, which would have been a bigger tragedy if he didn't have a fair hold on the current situation. What did a shirt and pants matter when there were people dead or dying? But as he changed, and he envisioned going into that factory, it made him remember what had happened the last time they'd been in there, who he'd seen.

He wanted to ask the Doctor about Miss Harrison, even if he knew deep down that wouldn't be her actual name. He wanted to ask, but he couldn't make himself do it. He remembered what the Doctor had told him so far, earlier, just as he remembered why they'd put the subject aside. The thing was, sooner or later Kurt would be going back to Lima, and to McKinley. He would go back and she'd be there, as this fake substitute teacher, and what was he meant to do? Was that really her, or at least, was she the same one he'd met? What if the one they'd seen in the new factory was an older version of her for some reason? Or a younger one? He couldn't say which one would have been harder to swallow.

But no, she looked exactly the same, he was sure she was the same one, but then that would mean that she could travel in time and space, too. And if she was there, at the factory, she had to know he'd be there; she'd come to lend him a hand, he was sure now. Even in knowing that though… the thought of coming face to face with her again… He wouldn't know word one of what to say.

"How do I look?" Kurt asked the Doctor when he stepped out again. He found the alien man staring at a violet dress hanging nearby. "Doctor?" he asked, and the dress slipped from his fingers as he turned back to answer the call.

"Yes? What?" he blinked. Kurt indicated his outfit. "Yes, that'll do, excellent, now…"

"Whose dress was that?" Kurt asked. He didn't peg the Doctor for the cross dresser type, but then there was a fair number of women's items around this room, which led him to consider the one female he'd known to travel in this ship. "Was it Donna's?" At the sound of the woman's name, the Doctor's face had changed, growing momentarily evasive before he locked on a story.

"Yes, it was, it… We went to Pompeii… Volcano day…" he recalled; he'd meant to lie, to make up something, but he couldn't do it, and he didn't know why.

"How did she lose her memories?" Kurt dared himself to ask, and he could see the Doctor still hesitated. Someday maybe he'd be able to talk about it without it making him feel the way it did now, but today was not that day.

"I told you, I had to take them away."

"But… why?" Kurt still didn't understand.

"Because if I didn't then she would have died," the Doctor came right out with it, frustration flaring. They were both silent for a moment. "But then she did, didn't she? She died, who she was, it died… and I did the killing. I put my hands on either side of her head, and she was begging me not to do it… Right until the end, she begged, and then the memories were gone, them and what was killing her, and she collapsed into my arms. I had to take her home, to her grandfather, and her mother, and explain to them what I'd done." He paused. "Then she woke up, and she came, and she looked at me and didn't know me… It was as it should have been, if she was going to live, but… If you knew everything she'd done, all the people she'd helped… That one died, because of me."

Kurt didn't speak, couldn't… The Doctor's grief was the thing bigger than the room that contained it now, and Kurt felt it. Donna had been his friend, and he felt responsible, for presenting her this grand life and having to take it away from her all over again. She was the reason they were here today, why they were helping the people of Coreidis, because those people at the new factory had gotten away. If not for those events, her losing her memories, maybe, probably, one day they would have gone, and they would have tracked down those people and they would have stopped them. But Donna wasn't there today. Kurt was there, and he would do all he could to honor her, and honor Blaine, too.

"I'm ready, let's go."

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	20. The Recruit

**"A Common Cause"**

**20. The Recruit**

_Coreidis, in the year 2019_

As far as Kurt had imagined, he would go into the new factory and inquire about working there with them, and one of two things would happen: either he would be told to go home and come back when there wasn't a giant rescue operation just outside, or he would be told to come back in the morning or some other day to begin training, and then he'd have to find some way to be admitted on that day regardless.

Neither of those things happened. When he went into the factory and told them he wanted to be hired, the woman at the desk had called for someone to take him in for his uniform before he could be fit into the next work shift. He hadn't seen more people going in since the others had left, but then maybe he'd just missed it… Either way, he was in.

He was taken along through the factory by a guy who couldn't have been more than a few years older than him. He was handed a uniform and told to put it on before being brought into another room where an old man stood waiting next to a chair in front of an array of consoles. He was sitting there, reading a book, which he put down when he saw Kurt being ushered in.

"Yes, good, thank you," he nodded to the young man who'd brought him, and they were left alone. "Have a seat, this is merely procedure, a physical, before we can put you through for training."

Kurt sat down, and the man went about strapping him in. If the Doctor hadn't told him this would happen, he might have freaked out and given himself away. It wasn't as though he wasn't nervous. The Doctor had given him something, which he swore he had worked on long enough that it would block whatever trance they attempted to put on to him. All he'd have to do would be to pretend like it had worked. The chair pulsed and he could almost feel the thing that was meant to turn him into one more hypnotized worker, so he put on his performance, showing himself falling prey to it. He had no idea if this was how it worked on people most of the time, but he'd have to go with it.

When it was over, he sat very still, waiting. The old man came around to face him, and it took some effort for Kurt not to look at him and see if he had passed the test. He hadn't felt a thing, thanks to the Doctor's blocker. Whatever the man expected to find, he must have found it, because the next thing he knew, he was being told to get to work, that his shift had already started.

It must have been part of this trance that he would know where he was meant to go, and he would have been in a heap more trouble if not for how he remembered where they'd been earlier, where they'd seen the workers. He didn't know if there'd be more than one room, there had to be. If they didn't think he was in the right place, he'd just have to play dumb faulty trance boy and let them sort it out… provided they didn't try to throw him out for being defective.

There was such a thing for being a volunteer, dressed for the part and walking like a good little zombie. Nobody bothered him as he went, and it seemed it was business as usual in the factory despite everything outside. When he reached the room, a woman had opened the door for him and pointed him to a station without a single word. Kurt went, seeing all the others standing at their own stations. He wondered how it worked, if they had to be inside the factory for it to work, or if they were 'activated' beforehand. It would explain why they'd come anyway, factory wreck or no.

He arrived at his assigned station, and he could see the others working along around him. He had observed them before, from overhead, and he remembered the motions, even as he saw them from this angle, but it took him a moment to situate himself. He could feel the monitor woman's eyes in his direction, and he had to get started soon, before she caught on to anything. He at least picked up what he saw the others holding, and soon he was able to get to work. He was slower than them, but that didn't seem to bother the monitor; maybe they had to work their way toward their speed, as they learned.

He'd been there all of twenty minutes, starting to pick up the rhythm and wondering why they would go to the length of putting people in trances if it was this easy, but the more he worked, the more he realized he actually worked much slower than the others. Maybe it was a matter of quantity, product output… whatever the product was supposed to be, he still wasn't clear.

The more he'd gotten into the swing of things, even if his 'swing' wasn't anywhere close to the others', the easier it had been not to notice anything around him, but he still managed to notice when the monitor touched the clip at her ear and then hurried to the factory floor's door. She opened it, and two of the guards dragged in a pair of workers, both in their uniforms, but definitely not entranced, from what Kurt could tell. Though he kept working, so not to give himself away, he could sense their distress… and he realized one of them was Della and Corius' sister.

"I have to get back out there, please, my brother's hurt, listen to me, no!" she struggled, but the fight went out of her when the monitor passed a rod that felt almost wand like to Kurt in front of the girl's eyes, doing the same to the boy who'd been dragged in with her. Suddenly they were back like the others, who hadn't been disturbed at all, still working at their stations. They went, and they got to work, and that was the end of it.

Kurt carried on for a while, letting things be normal again, so the monitor wasn't so alert on all of them. Once that time had passed, he'd been able to pause a moment, and breathe, and tremble.

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	21. Crossing Paths

**"A Common Cause"**

**21. Crossing Paths**

_April 2012 – Lima, Ohio_

For having been a student at this school back in the day, it was taking Walter a long time to find one person, especially when that person was part of the faculty and not the student body. But he must have been all around McKinley three times already and still he hadn't found Gemma. He started to wonder if she wasn't perhaps off on one of her jumps through time, on 'Doctor business,' as they'd taken to calling it. If that was the case, he might miss her entirely. He'd made it so he could take his lunch break at the same time she did, so he could come over and surprise her, but then maybe surprises weren't par for the course when the girl you were trying to surprise had this tendency of being in a whole other time and place than the one he was in…

His wanderings left him out there to be seen by anyone, and on this third go through the halls, he had been noticed, not by Gemma, but by a pair of Cheerios.

"Santana, that's him!" Brittany caught the other girl's arm to stop her and point at the man she'd spotted walking across the hall.

"Who him?" Santana frowned, following her finger.

"Remember, that day I went with Puck to try and get into Gemma's apartment," she had the common sense to lower her voice. "And there was that guy, that was a cop or something… That's him," she pointed again, and now Santana bristled.

"What the hell is he doing here?" she wondered if they might hide, but it didn't look like he even knew they were around.

"What if he's an alien? What if he's after her? He was in her building, he could be trying to kill her or something," the blonde's whisper took on an air of panic.

"Alright, relax," Santana frowned at her.

"Well we don't know, he could be. Something's supposed to happen around here at some point, what if he's part of it?"

"There's one way to find out," Santana made up her mind and started walking in his direction.

"No, San…" Brittany tried to stop her, and when she couldn't, she hurried after her.

"Hey, you!" Santana called out. "Tall guy!" It was only on the second call that the man turned, and when he realized that he was the intended recipient, he paused, watching the girls approach. He recognized Brittany easily, by her uniform. "I know who you are."

"Do you?" Walter asked.

"You do?" Brittany looked at Santana, who held up her hand so she'd stop talking.

"Britt saw you at one of our teachers' building a while back."

"Yes, I remember," he tipped his head forward. "I also remember you and this boy were not where you were supposed to be." He was trying to get them to leave him alone, Santana could tell, and if there had ever been any doubt whether or not he was really a cop, not she was certain. He was no more a cop than she was.

"You know, unless you have a really good reason for being here, I could go right down to the principal's office and tell them you were peeping in the girls' locker room and giving yourself a little…"

"Walter?" They all looked up as one, finding Gemma was walking in their direction. The man had never looked so relieved to see her, and she smirked. "What am I missing here?" she directed her gaze to the girls. "Santana? Brittany?"

"Did you know this guy was creeping in your building?" Santana pointed at him.

"Creeping?" Gemma frowned, turning a smirk to Walter, who shook his head at her. "He wasn't creeping, he lives there. If anything, you," she pointed to Brittany, "were creeping, with Puck." The blonde looked down.

"So… he's your neighbor?" Santana guessed.

"Boyfriend," Gemma corrected, and still looking to Walter, she could see the small smile teasing at his lips; she'd never called him that before. "So if there's nothing else, why don't the two of you go off to have lunch, I think hunger's starting to mess with your heads."

Santana still frowned, but she pulled Brittany away and they marched down the hall, taking a look back briefly to see the fake substitute smile at the man and sneak him a kiss.

"They're kind of cute together, aren't they?" Brittany smiled, internally relieved that they didn't have some deranged lunatic on their hands after all.

"I guess she has been a bit more upbeat these days, now we know why," Santana gave her a pointed look, and Brittany chuckled.

"Do you think he knows about her? How she's from the future and all that?" Brittany asked, lowering her voice once again.

"I don't know, maybe… probably not… What's the point, right? She's gonna leave anyway, when all this is over," Santana pointed out, and Brittany's face saddened. "What?"

"I just… I was hoping she'd stay."

"We're graduating at the end of the year, remember? We're almost out of here, so what does it matter?"

"Well what if I don't leave? What if I can't graduate?" Brittany explained.

"That's not going to happen," Santana vowed, taking her girlfriend's hand. "It'll be you and me out there in college, somewhere, you'll see." Brittany still had trouble getting on board with it, but Santana had a way to be encouraging, and she wanted to believe it, so she did.

"Maybe it won't be done by the end of the school year, then maybe we'll need to stay back, in case the Doctor needs us," she still went on, sounding much too optimistic toward that prospect.

"Yeah, well he… or she… has a ship to travel in space, they can come pick us up if they need us. As soon as they put that diploma in my hand I am out of here."

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	22. A Pillar & a Point

**"A Common Cause"**

**22. A Pillar & a Point**

_Coreidis, in the year 2019_

Once he'd been left to his own devices, seeing Kurt disappear through the doors of the new factory, the Doctor looked across the field, the ever changing landscape of the explosion's aftermath, and he barely had time to wonder what he would do next that he noticed something.

Running from the TARDIS back to the space between the factories, his eyes trailed the length of the beam planted into the ground… There was less of it. They hadn't cut it away, he still saw the same jagged end, but it had undoubtedly moved, deeper into the ground, into the new factory. Surely it must have breached a wall, it had to go somewhere, didn't it? He looked up, at the building as a whole, and he recalled the floor layout, where they had been. The beam would not be in that room where they had observed the workers, but surely by all accounts it would be near to it. He didn't know exactly what they had in there, on the other side, but he had a nagging bad feeling, like if they let that beam dig in any further, they would have more dead and injured to deal with.

There weren't so many options, not if they were going to act in time. He would need to make himself known, hoping that he might appeal to their self-preservation instincts, and that they wouldn't keep him from dealing with the situation. He knew what those people had been willing to do before, but would they be so cruel as to sentence hundreds of people to death? _Hundreds… thousands?_ These were people who had gladly murdered children, made murderers of them, too… He wanted to think they would do the right thing, but he was not so foolish to think they might go the other way. There was no other way. He'd have to realign his plans as needed.

The Doctor approached the pair of them, fairly casual. The man and woman, who had paused as a master and headmistress at the Isher Academy, were presently leaning over a man crouched at the side of his brother, who'd been wounded in the explosion and collapse, inquiring as to the man's condition and, as the Doctor came within earshot, offering to take on the man's brother as a worker in their own factory, where surely the pay, and an advance they'd be glad to provide, would guarantee that the wounded man would get the best care there was available to him. The wounded man was unable to speak, in his condition, but he only needed to look to his brother, who already seemed to share his opinion: the brother declined the offer, as gracefully as he could allow himself to sound; he barely succeeded.

"Well, all in time, right," the Doctor spoke, and the man and woman stood and turned to face him. "The poor man still has no bed to call his own but the ground underneath him," he pointed out, and this seemed to raise some amount of understanding as to what was the proper procedure. They would graciously bow out… for now, the Doctor ventured.

"Please, excuse us," the woman bowed briefly toward the two brothers before turning again to the Doctor. "You must forgive us, this day has been very trying, for everyone," she went on, her voice indicating she included herself and her cohort in this 'difficulty.' The Doctor might have laughed in her face, had he been the type. Instead, he stepped up, waiting for them to say or do as they were bound to.

But they only kept staring at him, and he could declare them talented actors, or he could reach the conclusion much more likely, and he only had to look at them to know that it was: they did not remember them, not at all. He might have been any stranger off the street, and to them that was what he was. It could well be that, given enough time they would put two and two together, but for now they didn't know, and maybe it was best to keep it that way.

"Yes, I see," the Doctor nodded. "Well, now, I mustn't stand in your way, please," he gave a short farewell and turned on his heel, retreating as casually and fast as he could.

Della and Corius had lost a brother. It might have been that they would have been too devastated to carry on, but there was one of their sisters, who had also been injured, and while her life still hung in the balance, she was clinging, and so they remained by her side. When the Doctor found them, he preceded his request for them to step aside and hear him out with an apology for the need to disturb them. When they asked where Kurt had gotten off to, he wouldn't say, not where they stood, and he did his best to convey that, with the man and woman from the new factory nearby, there were no chances to take.

When they'd finally followed, he'd explained the situation, about the beam, and its position, and its continued sinking into the ground, and what it could mean. He wanted their help, needed it. It had required for the Doctor to force them to listen, or they might have kept interrupting. They were convinced now more than ever that what had happened today, the collapse, their sister's injury, their brother's death, was because of them, the people from the new factory; they did not want to do anything that meant helping the people responsible. It had taken the Doctor's explicit explanation of what might happen if the beam was not dealt with properly, before they started coming around.

The beam could not simply be pulled back from the outside, not until they saw the inside. It might have been that if they pulled it out without seeing where it had found its home, it would be the thing that caused all those deaths. Della and Corius did not want to leave their sister's side. They didn't want to sit by and run the risk of more of their family dying either. So they agreed to follow the Doctor.

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	23. A Skill in Line

**"A Common Cause"**

**23. A Skill In Line**

_Coreidis, in the year 2019_

He hadn't even felt the time go by, but at one time the monitor had called for a pause, and Kurt had stopped, like all the others. As the woman would go along with her long cart, gathering up the completed boxes from each station, Kurt looked at his own accomplishments and he was stunned to find just how many he had completed. In the beginning it took him so long to finish one that he thought for sure someone would realize he didn't belong, but now… His pace had increased at some time, and as he waited for the cart to pass him by so he might look into it, he had a sinking feeling he knew the cause for his increased productivity.

He played the dutiful trance puppet while his pile was gathered, and when the woman had passed him by, he'd reached into his shirt and pulled it back so he might see the thing fastened on the inside of the fabric. Kurt hadn't known where else to put the thing the Doctor had given him so that it might not be uncovered in the midst of his work, but the placement didn't matter, not now. The blocker he had been given, the thing that prevented whatever 'training' was meant to be imprinted into his head from taking hold of him, was blinking, where it had been steadfast before. It was starting to fail. That was why he was getting better; the voices were speaking to him, and his brain had started listening.

He tried not to panic, but how could he not? If the blocker failed him entirely, what would become of him? He would keep on working for these people, with no other sense of himself but for how he was meant to assemble those boxes. He would become theirs, and he wouldn't know any better.

The monitor had finished her round, and she'd wheeled the cart out of the room. Immediately he knew he had to get out of there, that this might be his one chance. His brain was firing several ideas at him at once, and he didn't know whether it was the incoming trance or his own ability to turn things around in a pinch, but he had his ideas and he knew they made sense. For one, he knew that whatever was controlling him and all the others had to come from somewhere, not just those wand sort of things, or the chair. And if he had some of that in him, then maybe the closer he got to it, the more he would know he'd arrived. The next idea still needed proving, and he would just have to try it and see.

Hurrying from his station, he moved up to the ones where the last of them had been brought back in, the two who'd been 'reactivated.' He came to stand in front of Della and Corius' sister and he looked into her blank face.

"I need your help," he said, "Please come with me." Her head lifted, and though she looked at him, he didn't feel like her eyes were on him at all; it was just a bit terrifying. He had to put it aside for now. He was right, he could get them to listen to him. When he moved from her station to the next one, she trailed behind him. "Come with me," he told the boy, and he followed, too. He had half a mind to 'recruit' a few more, but as it was, their absence might not be noticed right away, and they needed that.

They left the room, Kurt and his two zombies, and he was forced to realize that he'd need to tell them everything they could or couldn't do, when he stopped walking and they nearly kept going, out in the open.

"No, stop," he told the pair, and they stopped. "Come back here, hide." They came back, and they hid.

If he kept going, kept fighting for this, he wouldn't have time to panic. That was all he could think about. The Doctor had sent him in here for a reason, and he was starting to understand why. Whatever he had to do out there, other things needed doing, primarily where the workers were concerned. It might have been the Doctor wanted him to find a way to liberate them, to break the trance that kept them glued to their stations, working. All those deaths at that school, where he'd been with Donna, and with Blaine, they still weighed on him, Kurt could see, and he wasn't going to let more people fall victim to that group's new con. So that was Kurt's thing, and he would accomplish it.

If he didn't keep going, keep fighting, then he would panic, and really how could he not? Even as he was instructing his two lackeys, he could feel something at the pit of his stomach like he wanted to obey his own commands. This worried him on so many levels. Like what was to say the orders he was giving them, and by association himself, were coming from him and not from this trance working itself free? He could be helping himself like he could be impeding himself.

_Keep going… keep going… don't panic…_

The monitor had gone back into the room. At this point, one of two things would happen. Either she would sit and return to her duties and not notice their absence right away (or, in a perfect world, at all), or she would see it right away and ring the alarm. Kurt looked back to his zombies, crouching there with hollow eyes.

"Do everything that I do and stay behind me, until I tell you to stop." That should cover all bases… he hoped. He stood back up, looked one way and the other, and then he dashed down the hall, hearing the patter of boots from the zombies on his heels.

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	24. Sheep in a Row

**"A Common Cause"**

**24. Sheep in a Row**

_Coreidis, in the year 2019_

Things had been going well enough, and then they'd nearly gone and gotten caught, so Kurt had made his zombies double back and hide in a new spot, where they might see when the way was finally cleared, but it didn't take long that Kurt had to face the fact they might be stuck here for several minutes, and he sat down on the ground. The zombies sat, too. He scratched his nose, and they scratched their noses. He stopped scratching when he saw they were scratching theirs, so they stopped, too.

He should have told them to stop, but he was trying to keep it together, and right now the best way for him to do this might have been to give himself something to smile about. So he brought his index to tap his nose. The zombies tapped their noses. _If we weren't hiding right now, we could have a three-part harmony…_ He pressed his hands together, they pressed theirs together. He wiggled his fingers, they wiggled theirs. He traced a line in his palm, they did the same. The sister had an involuntary shudder, like she was ticklish in her palm, but it only lasted so long before she was her same old zombie self.

"Just sit and wait," he finally whispered with a sigh, and when he moved to see if anything had changed out there, they didn't imitate him anymore.

Nothing had changed, and Kurt sat back with a sigh. He checked his blocker, and the moments when the light was gone seemed to have stretched wider and wider since he'd first checked. Every so often, he found himself briefly needing to pause because he didn't remember entirely who he was, where he was, and why he was there. But then he'd force himself to remember, about the ship, and the Doctor, and Donna… He thought about Blaine most of all. If anything or anyone could make him remember, it would be him, and his father, and his mother… He took a breath. The dust may have not been as present here as it was outside, but being that they did handle it as they worked, he only had to bring his hands closer to his face and he could breathe it in, let it soothe him.

To this day, he would find himself responding to the reflex of wanting to run home and tell his mother and father, whenever something great and wonderful happened in his life, as much as he'd want to turn to them with the things that were less so. It used to pain him more than he could say, when the moment would come and he'd remember that he couldn't tell his mother anymore, at least not face to face. The best he could do was to talk to her spirit, as though she was still there. He used to do it by looking at her picture, and he'd keep it hidden under his mattress, as though this way she would remain his, private, never to be taken from him. In time he had learned to live with it, but there were still times where he just wanted to be small again, and have her in his life.

When he'd breathed in the dust on his hands, he'd smelled… glue. It shouldn't have been that connective of a scent, but he swore he could tell the difference, and he could say without a doubt that this glue was in fact the one his mother would use when she made things, either for his school costumes, or craft projects… She would always make him stand back, because the thing was hot and it could hurt him. So he would stand at the edge of the table, with his hands where she could see them, and he would watch her. They would talk, and hum, and sometimes they would sing. There had been one time, and he remembered it vividly, when his mother had allowed him to handle the glue gun. He'd had to be very careful, and she'd held it with him, he figured, so all his fingers would be away from danger. He had made a clean line and he'd been so proud. He knew she'd been proud, too.

With this he'd realized she would have already been sick at the time, might have even known how this would all end. There were so many things he wished he could have known, things he might have known if he'd been older at the time. But he'd been too young, and she probably didn't want to frighten him…

A noise startled him, and it broke him out of his thoughts. Calming as they had been, now he had to focus again, so he did, crawling up to see what was happening. They were all but gone, those people who'd been blocking his way, and when the last of them went, he instructed his zombies to rise and follow him.

They were almost there, he could feel it, not just on instinct but by the fail in his blocker. Even his zombies seemed a bit more lively, and he was remotely aware that this could end badly, but they carried on. When he heard something, he turned to his zombies.

"This way, come on. They can't catch us," he told them, and he hadn't seen this for a mistake until the pair of them stood up straight and looked where he'd been pointing. "Oh no…" he breathed. Had he just ordered them to kill? "Stop that, you have to stay here with me, hide, h…"

"You three, stay where you are!" a voice called, and Kurt was appalled to find his limbs locked in step as fast as his zombies' did. His reflex might have been to turn and look, but he immediately stopped himself, thinking better of it. If he could carry on pretending like he was entranced, too, it might protect him. If they waved that wand thing in his face, who knew what it would do to him now that the blocker was almost dead?

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	25. More Than Anyone

**"A Common Cause"**

**25. More Than Anyone**

_April 2012 – Lima, Ohio_

To say she had office space where she could expect for them to have privacy would have been as far from the truth as anything ever was. If she'd been more easygoing with using the vortex manipulator to her benefits, she could have taken Walter off somewhere like Paris in the 1800's, or an alien world, or the distant future… But she knew better than to abuse the privilege she'd been granted, so she'd taken him to the football field, and they sat high up in the stands, where she was sure there would be no eavesdroppers without her knowing about them.

Walking from the cafeteria, back through the school, and out on to the field, Gemma could practically feel the quiet joy in Walter's face. He was not one to shy away from showing his emotions, and evidently something so simple as her calling him her boyfriend was something potent. She was feeling some of it, too, and she had kissed him, standing in the hall. This had earned her a comment from Coach Sylvester as they passed by her office, but Gemma was just not in the realm of caring.

"So how many of them know who you are?" Walter asked as they sat and started on their lunch.

"Well, all but…" she counted, "Four, of the Glee Club. And their director doesn't know either, and he won't," she shook her head. "By the time this is over though, they'll all know," she went on. _If everything goes right,_ she added in her head.

"What _do_ they know?" Walter asked then.

"What do you mean?" Gemma turned to him.

"I mean about you. They know your name isn't Ginny Harrison," he counted off on one finger.

"Oh," she blinked, understanding. "Yes, they know that, and they know I'm not really a teacher. Although at this point I might as well be," she shrugged. "They know that I travel with the Doctor and I was sent here by her." She tried to see if there was anything else, but she was coming up em… "Oh, they know I went to Juilliard," she ticked the item on her 'list' with a flick of her fork before it returned to her salad.

"I still haven't heard you play," Walter commented. He had been somewhat surprised to hear how she'd studied there, like somehow her being from the future meant that this wouldn't have been something she could do.

"Well, we're here, there are pianos, maybe on your way out we can do something about that," she nodded, and he returned the gesture with a smile. "Other than that, I haven't really told them all that much. I can't, or it might cause trouble," she frowned to herself. The nature of this trouble was one best kept quiet, at this point even from him.

"But I know all of those things," Walter went on.

"Yes, you do," Gemma smiled.

"And I know other things, too." She took on a position as though to say 'really, tell me more,' and he laughed. "I know you're from New York, and when you were… will be born… which makes me so much older than you, now that I think about it," he paused.

"Better not," she patted his knee. "What else?" He cleared his throat, got back on track.

"I know about your parents, and your sister, and your dog…" he listed off, and Gemma had a brief sigh, thinking of that fluffy goof back home. "I know about that tattoo you got…" he started, and she pointed a finger at him, "… which we don't tell anyone about, ever," he carried on, and she gave a firm 'that's right' nod before letting him continue. "I know…" he started, then paused, and the sudden drop in his smile told her exactly the words that would follow. "I know I love you, and I don't want you to leave." Sooner or later, it seemed that was always where they ended up, and it only became more pressing of a matter every time, as they came nearer to the end of… everything.

"See?" she spoke softly. "You know more than anyone." They were silent for a minute, and that was when she made up her mind to ask him. The worst he could say was no, and then they'd be right where they were now. "You know, I've never brought this up before, because in the long run it might be no more than a temporary fix, and it'll only make it harder afterward, but…"

"But…" he looked at her; if she had a solution that meant they didn't have to never see each other again, he was listening.

"You could come with us, with the Doctor and I. There are so many things out there for you to see, things I couldn't even describe without you seeing them with your own eyes. And even if we were gone for weeks and months, no one would have to know."

"Because you'd bring me back here and now," he filled in, and she nodded. "And then what? I still lose you," he looked at her, and what brief hope had started in his him was gone again. She breathed out. She didn't want to give up, not like this.

"Maybe," she confirmed, because she couldn't just lie to him. "Or maybe we'll find another way." They hadn't really discussed the dilemma, but just looking at him now, she knew he must have thought about it, and he must have understood it exactly as she did, the sacrifices one or the other would have to make for the sake of this relationship. "Like I said, it might not be a permanent solution… but it might give us a chance to find one, and then… and then we don't have to leave each other." He considered this, and he considered it hard. He looked at her.

"You know what I've always wanted to see?" he asked.

"No, what?" she replied tentatively.

"The Beatles, in concert," he smiled, and she grinned, putting the salad aside so she might embrace him.

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	26. A Bell Rung

**"A Common Cause"**

**26. A Bell Rung**

_Coreidis, in the year 2019_

Getting into the factory again had taken more than misdirection and convenient distractions this time. Luckily, they had help, though not from the young woman he would persist in calling the shimmer girl, as he wasn't convinced the name Kurt had provided would be her true name.

There were some of those from the new factory who wished to help, now that they were starting to clue in to what was really happening, but the Doctor refused for them to enter the building again. Already they could be activated without their knowledge, so he wouldn't take any of them along and run the risk that they might be used as pawns. They had eventually agreed to this logic, though it had not been immediate. There had been argument, but in the end Della had stepped up in support of the Doctor, and the others had eventually fallen in.

Where they had been able to help had involved trading in their uniforms, so the Doctor, Della, Corius and the others could sneak in. The Doctor had entrusted his suit with a young man who had taken the pile of clothes with no short amount of a feeling like he had better protect it with his life.

It was entirely possible that the brief conversation he'd had with the pair in charge of the new factory had made them raise the alert level, but then if the explosion had not made them do all that much out of the ordinary, why should anything change now? So they would have to do their best and work from there.

They had entered the factory, with the Doctor guiding them to where they needed to be, which was wherever the point of the beam had found its home underground. They had found the door, the Doctor had let them in, and there as suspected was the point of the beam. As it turned out, it wasn't nearly as bad on this end as it could have been. The point had missed any critical area, if only by a hair, and they were confident that merely extracting the beam would cause no more damage, be it structural or explosive. The rest of them were glad, and they considered themselves out of danger. As far as they were concerned, they could return to their injured loved ones' bedside and let justice deal with those responsible for the explosion. But the Doctor was not so confident as they were, not anymore.

The beam may have missed those critical areas, but then there it all was, and what he saw convinced him that things had not gotten better at all. When he'd seen it, he hadn't said a word. He'd marched back out of the room, leaving the others to scramble after him.

As much as they tried to ask him what was happening, why he was in such a hurry, he would not say. He walked, and he went on walking, until he tracked down the man and woman he was looking for. When he did find them, it just so happened that they were looking for him, too.

"You," the woman pointed at him. "I remember you now," she accused.

"Took you long enough, didn't it?" the Doctor didn't look the least bit concerned.

"Guards, seize them," the man ordered the security guards, who moved in to detain the group of intruders. "Search the perimeter, there may be others masquerading as workers among us," he told those who weren't now detaining the Doctor and his helpers.

"Look for a woman with red hair, and a young man with…" said the woman who had once been headmistress to the Isher Academy.

"They're not here," the Doctor cut her off, suddenly livid again.

"We'll be the judge of that, if you don't mind," the woman told him. "When you find them, don't hesitate to use force if you have to." They didn't know about Kurt, the Doctor told himself, and that was good news, for what little he could get. They would never know about him, or about the fact that they'd come together, if he had anything to say about it.

"You had to know I couldn't sit by and do nothing, not after what you did to those children at Isher," the Doctor glared at the woman. She only smiled and gave a light shrug.

"What can I say, it simply cannot be helped at times for there to be some collateral," she told him.

"By making murderers and victims both of children you chose to exploit?" the Doctor would have loved nothing more in that moment but to see that smile gone from the woman's face. "And now you're at it again, aren't you? I saw what you've been doing, what you've had your hive of workers preparing."

"Yes, I imagine you did. But we can't let people know that, can we? So it seems you and your friends will have to be put somewhere you can't cause more problems than you already have," she said, nodding to the guards.

Whatever words the Doctor had chance to speak as they were being dragged away, he doubted the man or woman paid them much mind. The guards weren't of much more help, and attempting to wrestle themselves free of them would only bring more harm than help, so the Doctor did his best to telegraph this to his helpers with a look. They had a much better chance escaping from wherever they were thrown than to take on a pack of physically stronger security guards.

They were led to a door, which one of the guards unlocked and opened, and in the next moment they were run into the darkened room. It took until after the door was slammed shut and locked again before they were able to both situate themselves and realize they weren't alone.

"Doctor?" He looked up, and he sighed both with relief and frustration. There stood Kurt, with a pair of new factory workers who were 'busy' staring at the wall.

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	27. Backfire

**"A Common Cause"**

**27. Backfire**

_Coreidis, in the year 2019_

The Doctor looked at the boy standing before him, wearing the same uniform he and everyone else in the room was wearing, and he breathed out. Even he would have found it difficult to identify whether the emotion he felt in that moment indicated that he was upset at Kurt for having managed to get himself caught and caged up like this, that he was upset that they had both been caught and caged, that he was glad the boy was unharmed, or that he was proud of him for having done whatever might have warranted his being seen as a threat just as he had been, because then surely it would mean he had done something to screw up the man and woman's plans.

"Isa!" Della spotted her sister behind them and moved toward her. The girl responded to the name only so far as she raised her head and stared at the one who'd called it. Her gaze was as fixed as ever. "What's wrong with her?" she asked the Doctor.

"It's the trance, they're all under it, the workers here, see?" he waved his hand in front of the girl's face, same for the boy next to her. "Nothing."

"They put me in a chair," Kurt revealed. "There was a machine."

"There wasn't a man there by any chance?" the Doctor asked. "Old, likes to read?"

"Yes," Kurt was surprised. "The thing you gave me, it stopped that machine from affecting me, like you said it would, so I pretended I was under the trance, and he took me to start working, but… Doctor?" he showed him the blocker. The Doctor frowned, doing his best to conceal any kind of concern. It was clearly failing, and it they waited too long it would fail entirely. "Can't you fix it?"

"There's nothing to fix, not here, not now, I'm sorry," he shook his head. "But listen, there is time enough that it won't be a problem, alright?" he looked Kurt in the eye, hoping he would know he was telling the truth.

"Right, okay…" he did his best to accept it. In his head, he wasn't doing nearly so well. The thought that he should ever turn into what Isa was like, what all those workers were like, was actually starting to terrify him the way going to school used to terrify him for a while, if only for different reasons. Deep down he knew that the Doctor was not only right but also worthy of the trust he felt toward him, but that only went so far, and after that all that remained was fear of the unknown.

"We need to get out of here," Corius insisted, and Kurt thought he might be experiencing a touch of claustrophobia, going by the way he'd started fidgeting.

"We will," Kurt told him, stealing a glance to the Doctor, hoping he wasn't spreading false hope.

"We need to, and we will. We need to stop them before they begin distribution," the Doctor declared.

"How do you know they haven't already?" one of Della's friends asked.

"I just do," was as much as the Doctor would say.

"I don't understand, what's the problem, they're just boxes, with dust, and…" Kurt shrugged.

"But they're not 'just boxes,' it is never 'just boxes.' Haven't you been paying attention, haven't you been listening? What did I tell you, about what they did at the Isher Academy?"

"They made the children into killers," Kurt answered nervously.

"How?" the Doctor asked.

"They had them in a trance," Kurt went on. Della looked to Isa.

"How?"

"They had these instruments, only they weren't instruments, they were weapons, they…" Kurt's voice halted. They all looked to the Doctor.

"Weapons?" Della spoke.

"You're saying those little boxes…" Kurt could see the stacks of them on his station, and the many more of those on the others' stations… and who knew how many more they had at their disposal?"

"But it can't be…" Corius couldn't let himself believe it. He didn't know what happened in the new factory exactly, but he did know that they had arrived and installed themselves as competition to the old factory, and if that was so, then whatever they did had to be in some way similar to what they did back at the old factory. They did not make weapons, he knew that much. "The dust…"

"The dust taps into that part of your brain where desires live, where those memories that make you calm and open live. Here, it's harmless, it allows an air of peace and joy and prosperity. Imagine what would happen if someone figured out how to flip it around, use it to get control."

"Don't they already have that?" Kurt asked, indicating his zombies.

"A parlor trick compared to what they'll do with those dust bombs. They'll have altered it, made it stronger. No wonder your blocker's damaged, you've been handling the stuff," the Doctor nodded to Kurt.

"You said they wanted to distribute it," Della frowned, already having a good idea where this was all headed. "If anyone can have it…"

"Not just anyone. Anyone that can pay the price," the Doctor told her.

"Alright, so how do we stop them?" Kurt asked.

"First things first," the Doctor went to stand before Isa. "We need to break the workers from the trance," he examined the girl with his sonic screwdriver.

"The woman, back there in the room where we worked, she had this thing, too, like a wand. She waved it in front of them and they were just like this again," Kurt revealed.

"Good to know," the Doctor adjusted a setting, pointed it at the girl again, then the boy, before slipping the sonic back in his pocket, placing a hand on both of their heads, shutting his eyes. After a moment, they did, too. "Oh… Well that's just… No, oh that is…"

He pulled his hands back with a start, and then he reached to pull Kurt, and Della and Corius away from the pair standing before them.

"What's wrong?" Della asked, as Isa and the boy opened their eyes and fixed them with a hard gaze.

"I may have made it worse…"

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	28. Through the Walls

**"A Common Cause"**

**28. Through the Walls**

_Coreidis, in the year 2019_

Despite Della's best assurances that Isa would never hurt her or Corius, the moment the entranced girl had taken a run at their brother, Della had swung out her arm and knocked the girl out cold, startling even herself. The surprise was short lived, as they had to turn right back around and deal with the boy, who had not been deterred in any way by Isa's being taken down and was looking to the handful of people standing about him as though they were everything that stood between him and his life, and he would go through all of them if that was what he had to do. The Doctor knew that look very well; it was just as striking on the young man's face as it had been on that of the children of Isher Academy. He'd hurried up, and in a quick connect, the boy was unconscious on the ground next to Isa. Della was crouched at her sister's side, shocked at herself for what she'd been made to do, and stroking the girl's hair, as white blond as her own, from her forehead.

"She'll be alright," Corius told her, sharing a confident nod, tapping their fallen sister's foot.

"Better not stay too close," the Doctor warned. "They'll likely wake up before long. We need to be gone before that happens."

"And just leave them here?" Della wouldn't have it.

"They'll be safer here than anywhere else out there," the Doctor assured her.

"What if they attack each other?"

"They won't. They saw each other, but it wasn't each other they tried to attack. As far as they know, they're on the same side. We get out of here, we leave them here, everyone is better off."

"You can get that door open?" one of the others asked.

"Oh, we're not going out through there, they'll have guards, and look outs, no, I'm not opening that door," the Doctor shook his head, all the while pointing to a grill high on the wall.

"You can't be serious," Kurt blinked, staring up at it.

"Often, no," the Doctor agreed. "But this time, yes."

"Then I'm staying here," Kurt declared, and the Doctor looked like he'd been blindsided.

"You're what? Kurt…"

"It's my fault they're here like this, if I stay here then nothing wrong will happen to them, I'll make sure of it. I never really hit anyone… successfully… but I'll do it if I have to. What I wouldn't give for some chloroform, right?" he tried to lighten the mood, as pointless an endeavor as it clearly was. The Doctor was in no mood to laugh; he looked more appalled than anything.

"Kurt, we have been through this before. I brought you here, it was my choice, and that makes you my res…"

"If you tell me I'm your responsibility again, I'm going to practice this thing on you," Kurt presented his fist. "Maybe I'm not as old as you are, but that doesn't mean I can't make my own choices."

"They don't need you," the Doctor pointed to the ground. "Not in the way you'd have it. They all need you, and me, and them, the workers, and those they'd make into victims. Up through there is where we can start changing things."

Kurt was quiet at first, but within moments Della had recruited her brother to give her a boost up to the grill, and she yanked it open, as quietly as she could. She looked inside.

"It's light enough to see," she reported. "Big enough, too, if we crawl in one after the other and…"

She was cut off when Corius suddenly fell out from under her. She tried to hold on, but then her fingers slipped and she fell halfway on top of him. All the while as this was happening, the rest of them could already see the truth of it, what had made Corius lose his hold on her, or who had done it. Their sister had not been nearly as out cold as they would have thought, and her first act in manifesting herself had been to grab hold of the first person she could, which so happened to be Corius.

The collective fall of both her brother and sister had near miraculously caused for Isa to be knocked out all over again. It also managed to convince Kurt the Doctor had the right of it.

Soon they had Corius and Della up. Della had sprained her wrist, but that wasn't going to stop her. One quick wrap later, she joined the others as one by one they were hoisted up to the tunnel, on to the start of their crawl. The Doctor came up last, closing up the grill behind himself as he went and taking one final look in to the room below, where he could see the boy was waking now. He sat up, took a slow look down to Isa, but he did nothing. They would be safe.

Onward the row had gone, down the corridor. Even from the back, the Doctor managed to direct them, although it was as he was taking up the rear and was about to pass one other grill that he stopped and called up for the others to stop, too. After a moment, he pushed the grill in and slipped into the room, a few more of them including Kurt doing the same.

"Doctor? What's in there?" Corius called down, as he and Della and the others remained up in the corridor.

"I think you might want to see for yourself," he'd replied. So they did, helping Della down as she kept her arm close to herself.

"Where are we?" she asked, looking around, confused. "What are all these crates?" Looking around, it was all they could see, only crates.

"What do you think?" the Doctor looked back at her. "How many of those boxes do you think each one can hold?" he turned this question toward Kurt. He'd handled enough of them to know, if they were all packed in like this, all around… There could be thousands of them, to each crate… and there had to be hundreds of those crates…

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	29. The New Ones

_A/N: Today is June 30th, but I will be posting the chapters for both June 30th and July 1st, because I am moving tomorrow, truck will be here very early and I won't have internet until Wednesday, so... yeah ;)_

* * *

**"A Common Cause"**

**29. The New Ones**

_April 2012 – Lima, Ohio_

Kurt knew eventually he would get used to this somehow, that keeping this secret from Blaine, which was not a bad secret to keep, would be difficult only for a while. He had done nothing wrong, neither of them had, and all he was doing now was keeping the Doctor's surprise, for when Blaine did meet him and make his request. He guessed he understood why it was necessary, as more than a 'ta da moment,' because then Blaine might not end up making the request in the first place, though until the secret keeping got easier, it would keep not feeling that way to him.

At this moment in time, while Blaine knew of the Doctor and – as far as he knew – was the reason Kurt even knew about him, he hadn't actually met him. What that would have made of him if he already had, Kurt didn't know, but for the time being, sight unseen, Blaine was very much interested in the mysterious alien. Already Kurt had sat and listened to his boyfriend as he speculated at length, and he would smile and nod and comment where he felt he was expected to, all the while ignoring the fact that he could have given him some of the answers he was after, and corrected some of the claims he made in error.

They were sitting at lunch in the cafeteria, and Blaine was speaking in low tones, wondering about the Doctor and whether he might have ever played a hand in their history, for better or for worse, whether he had tried at all to stop some of the greater tragedies of their time. Kurt was trying to think of what to say there when Sam passed by their table. He must have caught wind of the name 'Doctor,' because he stopped and turned their way.

"Hey, Sam, why don't you join us," Kurt leapt on the chance for a change of subject, indicating the empty chair. Sam gave a nod to Blaine as though to ask if he was okay with this, too, and once Blaine nodded back, Sam put his tray down across from them and sat.

"Look, maybe it's not up to me to say anything, but should you really be talking about… that guy… here?" he asked, indicating the cafeteria.

"I know, I… You're right," Blaine sat up, nodding again. "I can't help it though," he admitted.

"Oh, I know, me neither, sometimes," Sam made his own admission. "We're like the new ones right now, the three of us. Sometimes I think the others don't want to say anything except for when they get to tell their stories and how they met him, but the rest…"

"So you do believe them now?" Kurt had to ask. "I thought you didn't want to."

"Not at first, no," Sam confirmed. "I mean it sounds kind of crazy at first, doesn't it? Aliens, and space ships, and time travel… It's all fine in books and movies and TV and all that, but I never thought it could happen in real life," he explained.

"Do you think… we'll ever meet him?" Kurt asked them both, putting on a fairly solid performance for being clueless.

"That's what they seem to think is going to happen," Blaine replied. "Whenever that'll be."

Kurt couldn't say how he so often wondered about this. Whenever this encounter would happen, whatever it would entail, he knew this wasn't the meeting with Blaine that led to his request to the Doctor, so that would meet Blaine would meet the Doctor again, later, on his own. He would meet him, and see Donna, too, and they would all go after those people who took over Isher Academy. And when he came, Kurt was meant to go on and pretend as though he was meeting him for the first time? Blaine would know then that Kurt had met the Doctor, and still he would ask for this adventure to be passed on to him… not knowing that it had happened even before this supposed first official meeting that was coming up.

He wondered if this kind of timeline twisting ever gave the Doctor headaches the way it did to Kurt now.

"How do we know we haven't met him already?" Sam pointed out, and Kurt blinked, wondering how long they'd been talking without him noticing. "They keep talking about him and sometimes it doesn't seem like they're the same person. The one Artie talks about almost sounds like…"

"A woman?" Blaine pointed at him like he knew exactly what he meant.

"Yeah," Sam sat up, nodding firmly. Kurt took a bite of his lunch so he didn't have to say anything. "We should ask them, shouldn't we? I mean if he's here and we don't know, we might miss him. That wouldn't be good, would it?"

"No, it wouldn't," Blaine confirmed. Kurt almost asked as a joke whether the two of them wanted to be left alone, but then decided he didn't want to be sent packing from the table. At this point, if they forgot he was there, he didn't have to dodge questions and that was fine by him.

Maybe it was a good thing that his own adventure had happened when it did. He figured whenever this other thing was supposed to happen, he would have had enough time to internalize everything and make it so that, when he did come face to face with the Doctor again, he would be able to pretend seamlessly that this was his first time meeting him, same as Blaine, same as Sam. Although by what he knew, by what Gemma had told him, he had a feeling the man he would meet as the Doctor here would not look at all like the man he had met. What if the one that came to them was one that preceded the one he had met. Maybe he needed to work out some kind of signal, a discreet sort of 'hey, do you know me, because I know you' sort of thing.

He hoped this headache would pass before he had to get back to class.

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	30. Crazy Ideas

_A/N: So I moved two days ago (yaaay). I had written in advance up to yesterday's chapter (which is this one), but yesterday was so crazy that I didn't get to post it, and ditto that today until now. I haven't written today's story yet, and I am just too physically and mentally spent to write today, so I will do it tomorrow and put it up then. It's possible I'll be in this one-day-behind delay situation for a couple days more, but hopefully everything will get back on track before too long :)_

* * *

**"A Common Cause"**

**30. Crazy Ideas**

_Coreidis, in the year 2019_

It was hard to look away from the mountains of crates before them. Even if they had tried to turn their backs and pretend they weren't there, they were such a powerful presence that they felt constantly dwarfed by them. Still, it was better to have that than to see them, so they turned their backs on the crate, focusing instead on what they were now meant to do, in order to rid themselves of their problem. Kurt hesitated for a moment, but finally he spoke.

"I may have a… well…" he had been brought back to silence the moment everyone looked at him.

"Go on," the Doctor encouraged him.

"It's nothing, it's a crazy idea," he insisted.

"Love those, tell me," the Doctor kept on staring at him.

"Well… all those guys, the workers that are entranced right now, I know I can get them to listen to me, to do what I tell them to do, so we could use them to help stop those people, couldn't we? They could distract them and maybe we'd have time to fix all this," he pointed over his shoulder to the crates they were pretending weren't there.

"Ah…" the Doctor considered this.

"But then it's crazy, because they could get hurt, right?"

Even as he'd said it, he'd known that it was a faulty plan. Isa and the boy had been easy to handle in the end, and because it had been them, as opposed to their leaders, they had been stopped without any real harm to them. By now they had to be awake, sitting on their own and doing nothing because no one was there to tell them what to do, locked in a room. Here he'd come now, suggesting they use the others like them, when he knew almost right away that all this could do was give reason to their leaders to terminate them, by any means necessary.

He'd thought for a moment that the Doctor would take in this contribution to the effort from Kurt and consider him useless to the cause all of a sudden, regretting that he had brought him. But the Doctor looked at him, not at all discouraged.

"Right," he answered, then, "So what can we do instead?" Kurt took a breath, thinking again. He could still catch the scent of dust on his fingers, dust, and pancakes on his birthday…

He turned back to look at the crates. He must have been just at the turn of his blocker's failure where he was keyed in to both sides of it all, because he could already settle a fair guess as to the effort that would be required if they were only to…

"I can lead them," he spoke now. "I can bring them here, not out there. They made all of these boxes themselves, they know better than anyone, and they can do it faster than anyone. I'll tell them to take them apart, then no one can use them," he looked to the Doctor, and he found him almost smiling.

"Can you do that?" Corius was impressed.

"Yes," Kurt nodded.

"What do you need us to do?" Della asked him, and all at once it seemed the workers from the old factory had claimed Kurt for the leader of this operation.

"Can you keep them occupied? Those people, and the guards?" The blonde had something of a smile at that, turning to her brother and their friends for a moment before turning back to Kurt.

"I've been waiting a long time to give them a piece of my mind," she told him.

"Just be careful, okay?" he asked. He didn't want people getting killed on account of him. Della said nothing, but her eyes dared anyone to even try and lay a finger on her or her people. "Can you find your way out?"

"I'd go for those things again," she nodded up to the grill, but then looked back down to her sprained wrist, her arm tucked close to herself. "In this case though, let's try the door instead. You two wait here a while, give us time to really get it going."

So Della, Corius and the others left, leaving only the Doctor and Kurt and the many crates.

"When we get out of here, I'll key in your prints to the system. You'll be able to open any door," the Doctor told Kurt.

"Right, okay, good," he nodded. He was nervous again, and he didn't want the alien man to see. If the Doctor did, he never brought it up. "So what are you going to do?"

"I need to find the source of the trance. There's too many of them out there, and they'll be better off when it's been shut down."

"You'll have to wait though, won't you? If you take the trance away, won't we forget how to do it all?"

"I'll do what I can, but it might be we'll have to find another way. For now, get them here, get as much done as you can."

"I will," Kurt promised.

"I knew there would be risks in bringing you here, though not like this. Still, I have to say, you've done well, Kurt," the Doctor told him, and he smiled, but he could see the Doctor's face, and he was concerned again. Them being here, it was to honor Donna, for what she'd done and what she'd lost, he knew.

After what they felt was sufficient time had passed, they exited the room. The Doctor did as he'd said he would do, making it so that Kurt could open any door he came to, so he might bring the workers here and set them to disarming the boxes. After that, they went their separate ways, each to his task.

Kurt worried about what would become of the Doctor when this honor had been bestowed, when all was said and done, and she was still gone. Kurt thought about him, this man who'd lived so long… How many people he must have lost, year to year, century to century…

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	31. The Old, The New, The Newest

_A/N: Okay the delay was a bit more than I was hoping for, but now I've got them all written, both the late ones and today's, so here we go ;)_

* * *

**"A Common Cause"**

**31. The Old, The New, The Newest**

_Coreidis, in the year 2019_

They had been waiting for this moment, all of them. So many times they had told themselves they needed to deal with this new factory, for what it was doing to their home and their people, but they had never succeeded. There might have been a time where their pride was that much more impenetrable, where they would have looked upon the Doctor and Kurt as outsiders who couldn't possibly understand what they had lost and what they were trying to get back. But time had kept on passing, and with it had gone any solid memory of the way things used to be.

The people of Coreidis had been a serene people. They lived in the warm embrace of their dust, inspiring good memories and a feeling of lightness that inspired them and motivated them through their lives.

Then the new factory was built, and at first they didn't understand what it would turn out to be, not really. It was built, and it opened, and some people would go and work inside it, but it wasn't an immediate turn. They never saw it coming at all, not until it had already happened.

When finally they had their eyes opened to the situation around them, that was when the divide had really begun to happen. There were those who had gone to work at the new factory, and they would extol the virtues of their new employers, seeing absolutely nothing wrong or ill meant about them, even when put up against any kind of proof. On the other side, there were those still loyal to the old factory, their factory, and while some of them would keep quiet, because they didn't dare involve themselves, there were others, like Della and Corius and their friends who had begun a quiet campaign toward resisting the new tenants next door.

In some ways they would feel like they should have known, deep down, that there was more to it than successful hiring. How many of their friends and families, each of them as fervent of supporters as they were, suddenly and with no real explanation, turn on them and join the new factory? They had originally believed that it might have been something like coercion and blackmailing, that they had threatened them or held something over their heads to make so that they would betray their cause, but now they knew better. Something had been done to their thoughts that forced them. All that was about to end though.

It wouldn't take long at all for them to gather up a sizable force. As much as their friends didn't want to leave those who had been injured in the factory collapse, once they knew what was in the process of happening, they knew their fallen would think of no better place for them to be than to help Della and Corius, and the Doctor and Kurt inside. Soon there were dozens of them, a hundred and some, more and more, workers past, present, and future. Those who wished to join the factory, in one capacity or the other, part or full time, could do so starting at the age of sixteen, but even before then they would know that was what they wanted to do, and there were some of them here, as young as nine, and the others tried to keep them away, but there was no point to it. This was their fight as much as anyone else's.

They all knew what their task was, to keep those new factory bosses busy, keep them here, outside the factory and unable to realize there was anything wrong that might need to be dealt with inside. They were aware that there was a third to the team, not to mention guards and monitors, inside the factory, and once they had handled the two outside, they would see to those as well.

"I can do it," Corius took his sister's arm, seeing her stare off at the man and woman still going on, unaware. Della shook her head, never looking away.

"I need to do this," she declared; she'd been waiting a long time to give them a piece of her mind. "Everyone!" she shouted, climbing on top of a piece of debris as her podium. "We have lost many of our own today, friends, family, fellow workers, and I know each and every one of you has known the truth, whether you dared to speak it aloud or not. But now you know. We have shared our discoveries with you, and you know the harsher truth we still ignored before this day. I ask you now, will we stand by and hold our tongues again?"

"NO!" the cry boomed in so many voices they might have brought down what remained of the torn factory.

"There stand those who have attacked us," Della pointed her finger to the man and woman.

The circle of men, women, boys, and girls surrounding the pair would tighten in such a way that they had no hope at all of slipping through, and from her perch on high, Della knew they knew it, too.

"Della, don't let them be killed, it's not the way," Corius called to his sister.

She looked at him, and had it been anyone else, she might have shrugged the thought away. But it was her brother, and he was dear enough to her that his words could affect her decisions. Right now, she saw, as much as her first instinct was to punish the man and woman who had caused so many deaths, one of them their brother's, that their death would accomplish nothing.

"We can't let them get away," she told Corius.

"They're not going anywhere," he promised, holding his hand up to her. She took it, hopping down from her perch so that they might head in to deal with the pair. With any luck, the Doctor and Kurt would already be well on their way to bringing the new factory's efforts to a final halt.

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	32. Drones

**"A Common Cause"**

**32. Drones**

_Coreidis, in the year 2019_

He didn't know how much longer he could hold on. He'd been walking to find the entranced workers, and it had taken him seconds to realize he'd been standing there, aimlessly looking around, for near on two minutes before that. He had forgotten what he was supposed to do for a while there. But it came back to him, and as soon as it did, he hung on tight. It still worried him. What if next time he didn't snap out of it? What if he spaced out and instead of helping the Doctor and the people of Coreidis by disarming the boxes, he only joined the other zombies and made more?

Again, as it had been before, the thought of Blaine was the one thing he knew to hang on to in order to keep hold of who he was and what he was meant to be doing. He was no pawn of the factory, he was Kurt Hummel of Lima, Ohio, United States of America, Earth… He had a father who loved him, and a mother, too, if only in spirit. He had a stepmother, and a stepbrother, who were his family now. He had great friends… And he had Blaine Anderson, the boy he loved. _This is for you._

He knew where he had to go, and he knew what he'd have to do in order to get this right; there was little to no margin for error.

At the door, he pressed his thumb to the pad, and a circle of blue light traced itself around his digit, which was followed by an approving-sounding tone: the door had unlocked. He swung it open, and after all of a second in which to see things were just as they'd been before, with the workers all around and the one monitor out front, he addressed the workers.

"All of you, stop." They stopped.

"What are you…" the monitor stared at him, confused, but he didn't answer her.

"Turn and face me." They did. "You two, restrain her," he pointed to the monitor. She might have been too stunned to resist. "You two, tie her up." The rolls of twine used to bind the boxes were now used to do as Kurt bid, and it was only now that the first loop had been made that the woman started to understand what was happening and started to resist. "I'm sorry, it's nothing against you," Kurt had to tell her. "We'll come and let you go when it's done, I promise."

The instructions weren't taken so easily on her part, as they had been with the workers, but by the end of it, she was bound and left to roll helplessly on the ground, gagged so she wouldn't shout.

"Right, all of you follow me, single file," Kurt told the workers, and as he went to the door, he saw them fall into position, one behind the other. Kurt had half a mind to start whistling the tune the campers in the Parent Trap would whistle as they led those twins to isolation. It would have been one way to keep himself minded, but then as they were already much too obvious, he wasn't about to make it worse, so he kept quiet and whistled in his head.

The Doctor wasn't there when Kurt reached the room, but then he hadn't expected him to be. He'd be off working to break the trance that had allowed Kurt to lead the workers here. As much as he wanted for it to be taken away from them, and from him almost most of all, he knew they could get so much more done with the trance than they could ever hope to do without it. They had to hurry before it was too late.

Once again, his thumb got the door open, and Kurt told the workers to go inside and wait for him. After the last of them had gone in, he had given them as precise of instructions as he could give them, and within a minute they were working, the first boxes disarmed.

He had to go and repeat his actions, restraining the monitors, getting the workers to follow him, six more times before he knew he had all of them. By then there were hundreds of them packed in the room, and they were all working to increase the number of disarmed boxes and decrease the number of armed ones. Now that he had no more workers to bring in, Kurt had taken on the task as well.

He could barely believe how fast his hands were going, but then he didn't even have to think about it all that much. He knew what he had to do, and he did it. The room was filled with the sound of clicking, and ripping, and clacking, and tearing, and before long it resonated with rhythm, to the point where Kurt found himself listening to it more than his own mind, and after a while he realized he'd drifted away again. He came to a stop, startled; his hands were shaking. He couldn't forget, couldn't let himself get carried away…

The hundreds of workers were still going along, uninterrupted, and the piles of disarmed boxes were neatly rising around them. There was still so much left to do, and it could have been discouraging, but none of them… none of them could… They didn't know how much time they had left, and at this point Kurt knew he couldn't keep worrying about himself. The Doctor was working to free them all, so even if he did give in to the commands beneath the block, he wouldn't know any better than to keep doing what he and the others were doing, and eventually the Doctor would break the trance and free them all. If he had to let go, just for a little while, to help keep all these people safe, then it was a small enough bargain. They could do this, he could do this…

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	33. Helping Hands

**"A Common Cause"**

**33. Helping Hands**

_Coreidis, in the year 2019_

With his task set as it was, there was no reason for the Doctor to allow any kind of distraction, and for a while he didn't. By the constant pulsing of his sonic screwdriver, he had come to discover the source of the trance, the thing that both generated and maintained it. Even standing at the door, it felt as though he was missing something. It had nothing to do with this day, this situation, not as far as the factories and the trio from Isher was concerned, but at the same time… maybe it did. He might have paid it more attention if it wasn't that he had so many other things cluttering his head. For now, he only went through the door.

"You!" a voice startled him.

"Yes, hello," he tipped his head to the old man with the book. The man stood in his place for a beat, as though considering his options. He must have decided he was better off making a break for it. The Doctor didn't try to stop him when he ran. That was the beauty of knowing things other people didn't, which happened to him a lot. In this case, the Doctor knew that, try as he might to run, the old man would soon find himself face to face with Della, Corius, and the rest of the revolt. The Doctor would let them deal with him; he had something else to look after.

Whatever they'd done in the four years since Isher, the trio had not just sat around twiddling their thumbs. They had perfected their technology. Although… The more he looked at it, the more the Doctor knew it couldn't have possibly been theirs to begin with.

"I was wondering if you might show up," he spoke after a minute. When he turned, there she was again, smiling that same old 'there's so much I haven't told you' smile of hers.

"I thought you might need a hand," she shrugged, approaching.

"What ever gave you that impression, Shim…"

"Don't," she cut him off, frowning.

"Don't what? Call you Shimmer Girl? I can't go and call you Ginny, can I, since we both know that's not your name."

"Yet you persist on calling me by that other one," she countered.

"I picked that one," the Doctor nodded. "Until I know what I'm really meant to call you, what choice do I have?"

"I'd take 'hey you over there' over Shimmer Girl," she scoffed. He looked ready to reply, but then he stopped, looked back to the machine. There were more important things than names and nicknames. "Do you know how to stop it yet?" she asked.

"It's not just stopping it that's the problem…" the Doctor told her, still staring. He knew what could go wrong, he'd made it happen before. He would try and stop it, and instead he'd only make it worse. He wouldn't have been surprised if that was part of the programming. Pulling one cord only tightened five more… He had to slash them all away in one go.

He could feel her staring at him, though when he looked back at her, she was looking away, making as though she was entirely interested in what was in front of them. Here she was now, standing by his side like it was any other day, and yet not long ago, she had been in the habit of hiding from him, of running when she was seen. She would know that, by coming to him when she did, where she did, he'd be in no position to run after her if she ran, or to grill her about who she was. Time was of the essence, as they'd say.

"So why are you here? Besides for cheat cryptic shots," he asked, pulling his glasses from his pocket and slipping them on before he could lean in to observe the machine.

"Company," she replied, and he looked back over his shoulder, frowning.

"Company?"

"You're alone, Doctor," she went on, and she sounded suddenly sad as she said this. He went on frowning.

"I have Kurt."

"Fine, yes, and what about after all this is done?" she asked. He had nothing to say. "You'll take him home, and then you will be alone."

"So what if I am?" he asked. She only kept staring, so he turned back to work.

"I know what happened," she stated, and he tensed. "I don't think she'd want you to be alone either."

"Well maybe I need to be," he carried on working, though his tone had allowed some space for the interpretation to be 'for now.'

The Shimmer Girl, Ginny, whatever her name was, had not brought up the subject of his solitude anymore. Instead, she had helped him dismantle the trance machine. It wasn't long he was forced to admit to himself he wasn't entirely unhappy to have her there, and that they seemed to work well together.

"It'll be done soon," she said, and he sighed, thinking of Kurt, back in the crate room. They didn't have a choice now, they had to finish it and take the trance.

"Thank you," he ended up telling her, and she smiled.

"Still not telling you my name," she told him, and he nodded, having expected as much. "But I will ask you something anyway."

"Fancy that," he shook his head, but she still smiled.

"Years from now, there'll be a day when you and I meet, and it'll be my first time seeing you. I need you to remember today," she tipped her head. He said nothing, knowing she wasn't likely to explain any further.

"What's so special about today?" he asked.

"One day, you'll tell me this was the day you knew you could trust me," she revealed. Seconds later, she was gone, shimmered away, and he was alone again.

Letting out a breath, he thought for a moment about Donna Noble… and Martha Jones… Rose… So many before them and in between, and who knew how many more to come. One day, he'd lose that Shimmer Girl, too… And they wondered why he was alone.

With one final tap, the trance fell.

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	34. A New Rhythm

**"A Common Cause"**

**34. A New Rhythm**

_Coreidis, in the year 2019_

He had no idea how much time had passed, or how long it had been since he'd lost the last of his control over himself, when the blocker had finally failed entirely, but all of a sudden it was over. He blinked, and he was himself again. The trance was gone, completely gone, he could feel it, and he took a deep breath.

His relief was slightly short lived, as he could see all around him the workers experiencing the same realization of their freedom. The difference here of course was that while Kurt had known what was happening with him, they'd had no idea. He wondered if they even knew they'd been working for the new factory.

In the chorus of confused voices, Kurt was able to take a moment and see how much had been done in his 'absence.' The piles of disarmed boxes rose so high that he wondered how it could be that the piles could hold, or how they could get the latest completed boxes added to the lot.

He didn't have much more time to think about this. All around him, the workers now free of their trances were slowly but surely going through some steps. First came confusion, wondering where they were. Then, even though they could not see the outside of the building or even all that much of the room they were in, they did have the uniforms on their backs, and they could establish plainly that they were in the new factory and, not only that, they apparently worked there. For many of them, it had long become that anything to do with this new factory was as far from where they wanted to be, so the confusion, after passing through discovery, slipped naturally into anger. Everything was about to come undone, unless he did something. But how was he meant to make himself heard in a sea of voices that buried him so deep he could hardly hear himself think?

Short of sending the mountain of disarmed boxes to topple over, his one option was to resort to a 'classroom classic' method. Spotting the light control near the door, he hurried toward it and flipped it off and on a few times, until the voices had dimmed away, and the heads turned toward him. Rather than being amazed that it had worked, Kurt started talking, hoping whatever he thought to tell them all would be enough.

"You're okay now. The thing they did to y… to us, someone took it away. They can't control us anymore. But we still need your help." He told them all about what they had discovered, about what the people from the new factory had been aiming to do with the dust, what they'd been forcing the workers to do, under this trance, and what Kurt and the Doctor had been using them to do in the last little while, why it was important that it be done, all of it.

There weren't nearly so many left now that still needed to be disarmed, but it was still a number sizable enough to be problematic. It didn't take long to confirm that, now without the trance, they didn't have any real idea what they were meant to do to disarm a single box, much less hundreds. And then without the trance, even if they did know what they had to do, they would never do it as fast as they'd been doing it only minutes ago. Kurt thought he might remember some of it, seeing as he'd first learned to do it by watching them, being in control of his own thoughts at the time. But it was as though losing himself to the trance and then having it taken away had left him confused. He might have been able to do part of it but not all, and the potential for his making a monumental mistake was much too strong for him to risk it.

And then there'd been a rise in voices again, briefly, and Kurt had turned to learn the cause of it… He'd never been so happy to see that man.

"Doctor, the trance…"

"All gone then?" he asked, casually walking forward, picking up one armed box in one hand and one disarmed one in the other, inspecting one, then the other, then the first again, and the second again.

"Looks that way. We have a lot of it done, from before, but we still have…" he gestured to the armed boxes. "No one remembers."

"That's alright, they'll just have to learn again," the Doctor went to put down the boxes where he'd taken them, paused, looked at them again, then confirmed he'd been about to put them in the wrong order and switched. "With some adjustments," he moved to address the workers, which was no problem, as they were already staring back at the strange man who'd just waltzed in. "Right, listen up, there isn't much time, so I want no arguments, understood?"

The workers were surprisingly compliant. The Doctor had required little to no time in order to figure out how the boxes were armed and what they had to do in order to disarm them correctly, so he set up the workers in teams, the better to speed up the steps, assembly line style. In no time, they had resumed their work, and the Doctor's system was working so efficiently it was to wonder if it wasn't faster this way than with the trance.

It had seemed an impossible thing at first, that they should find a way to go through the entire stock, but then it kept dwindling and dwindling, until the last crates were being worked through. It was almost over.

"We did good, right?" Kurt breathed, as the last boxes were going through the lines.

"For a day's work, we most certainly did," the Doctor told him. It was nearly done now, not just here in this room, but their entire purpose for being on Coreidis, and soon they would be gone, back to their separate lives. "One day you'll know we did very good."

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)


	35. All In Time

**"A Common Cause"**

**35. All In Time**

_April 2012 – Lima, Ohio_

Every time she returned to Lima, to McKinley, knowing that her involvement with one encounter or another, Gemma always needed time to stop and separate herself from it before she could carry on to another. It was one thing for the Doctor to live weeks, or months, or even years, between encounters with the students of McKinley, whereas for her it was more… ongoing. It may have been that days and weeks went by before she knew where she was meant to go next, but always it was with the expectation that it would happen.

This time she knew, with no need of confirmation, where she'd be headed next, though the when was still pending. They were so close now, she knew, and the anticipation only became harder to bear with each day that passed. Even now that she knew Walter would be coming with her and the Doctor, there was so much that she didn't know, and that had always been something she liked about travelling on the TARDIS, but after months of sedentary life, it would take some time before she could find her old rhythm again. She never would have believed it if she wasn't living it.

Strangest of all was how much she was starting not only to grow accustomed to her cover as a teacher, but she was starting to enjoy it, too. It was to the point where, when the small group of them came up to her, she thought for a moment that they might have been coming to ask her something to do with class, which of course they were not.

"So who do we have to go after now?" Santana asked.

"Please, say it a little louder, I don't think they heard you in the teachers' lounge," Gemma directed them into the nearest empty classroom she could find.

"Well?" Santana was not deterred, and Gemma sighed, looking at her, and Brittany, and Sugar, and Blaine and Kurt. Kurt, for his part, was trying not to look at her too much, and she knew he had to be figuring he wasn't supposed to think too much of her at this point.

"Well, what?" Gemma kept up her front.

"There are others, aren't there?" Sugar asked.

"Even if there were…"

"It's not like we need you to tell us anymore anyway," Santana shrugged. "It's the Glee Club, we get it, and there's only four of us now that aren't in this yet, so we just need to…"

"Alright, stop right there," Gemma stared her down, and now they were listening. "Don't you think that if it was just about telling everyone like that I would have done it already? This is a time sensitive situation, and if you rush it, then everything we've done, everything I've done, being here all these months, will have been for nothing. You have no idea what this is all for yet, and if you did then you'd know how important…"

"Then tell us," Brittany piped in, and Gemma could see the others were falling in with her, agreeing.

"It's not my place to tell you, not yet. I know how hard it can be to trust that I'm telling you the truth, but I need you to do it." They were silent for a beat.

"I trust you," Sugar spoke slowly, and looking at her, Gemma smiled.

"Me, too," Kurt jumped in, and whether they saw this as odd coming from him or not, they didn't bring it up. The two voices speaking in her favor had done enough to soothe the rest into agreement.

"I will tell you," she looked to them all in turn. "As soon as I can."

She wished they knew how hard it was for her to hold her tongue, in so many ways. They couldn't see the big picture the way she could see it. If they did, they would never question a single one of her decisions.

They hadn't been wrong as far as the shrinking pool of people they needed to go after. Of all those members of New Directions, only four remained unaware, but before this was all done, they would all need to be informed, and when they were called in to help again, the next time, they would have twice the work, if they were to pull in their next two targets.

It had been easy for Gemma to slot those four remaining members of McKinley's show choir. She didn't know the details just yet, or when they were supposed to attend to them. What she did know was that one day the Doctor had told her a story, about something that had happened to her once, and though Gemma had not understood it right away, eventually it had dawned on her why she had been told this story: she was going to need it when she came to Lima, someday.

Like Blaine, like Sam, their encounters with the Doctor, their personal encounters, not what was about to come to pass in a matter of weeks, these two would have to hold it on the words of friends that there was an alien called the Doctor who travelled in time and space aboard a ship called the TARDIS that was bigger on the inside, because they hadn't met him yet, and they wouldn't meet him, not for some time.

It might have been trickier still to not let pass the fact that they would be having this future encounter together, or that in a matter of months it would seem unlikely to them. Gemma didn't know why the Doctor had found it necessary to write in that notebook of hers how Mike Chang and Tina Cohen-Chang would be breaking up before long, especially when she also saw it fit to note that in a decade's time they'd be married and living in Chicago.

TO BE CONCLUDED (TOMORROW)


	36. Worth the Wait

**"A Common Cause"**

**36. Worth the Wait**

_San Francisco, California – in the year 2015_

Kurt had seen so much understanding in Blaine's face as he'd told him about how he'd had to fight to hold on to the block, and how the time he'd lost when he'd finally been swallowed up by the trance continued to weigh on him; he'd gone through that as well. Of all the experiences for them to share, he would have wished to be able to spare him that one. But at least he had the rest of the story, the part that would be the important one in the end.

He told Blaine about how they had finished disarming all the boxes, and how by the time they were able to lead the workers out of the new factory, they had found the trio responsible for both the factory and the events at Isher had been caught and would be judged for their crimes. There had been a moment where the people of Coreidis had looked ready and willing to execute the men and woman on the spot, but Corius wouldn't let them, nor would Della, nor would the Doctor or Kurt, and in the end they had managed to lead the trio away. By the time the Doctor and Kurt were able to say their farewells to the brother and sister and the rest of their family, they were left confident that they had achieved what they'd gone hoping to achieve, in honor of the people they meant to honor.

"We couldn't bring back all those people who died because of them, but at least no one else will be hurt because of them," Kurt told Blaine, and that made him smile. It was all still so fresh in his mind, and it was hard to imagine how, the way Kurt had experienced it, it was actually four years later, but he'd deal with it eventually. They'd been stopped, and that was what mattered.

"So what happened then?" he asked.

"We went back to the TARDIS. He showed me around a bit," Kurt nodded. "After that, he took me back to Lima. I was… exhausted," he chuckled, remembering. "But then right after the ship was gone, Gemma showed up."

"Wait, what?" Blaine blinked, and Kurt nodded. "She came to you?"

"She did," he kept on nodding. "She told me everything." Blaine was stunned. "Well, not _everything_, but you know what I mean. She told me who she really was, and she told me not to tell you all that I knew. She also told me not to tell you, about how I'd met the Doctor, what we did… It had to be a surprise, even if it took years."

Three years had passed since both Blaine and Kurt had been made to discover this world they had been strangers to, of aliens and other worlds, and time travel and Time Lords… Now this day had come, and with Blaine's return and Kurt's revelation, it did feel as though it was the epilogue to a very long story. Whether they had been ready to say goodbye to that story was uncertain, but there was nothing to be done for it. As far as they could tell, they had seen the Doctor and his ship for the last time ever. They would never forget what they'd lived through, but from now on it would have to be a story to them and nothing more. But it was a story they shared, and that was alright.

THE END

* * *

_A/N: Check out the next installment in the series, **Ex Memoria**, starting tomorrow!  
_(But really today, because I had a power outage last night, boo ;))


End file.
